The complete writings of James Russell Lowell

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THE COMPLETE WRITINGS OF

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

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WITH PORTRAITS ILLUSTRATIONS
AND FACSIMILES

IN SIXTEEN VOLUMES
VOLUME V

AMONG MY BOOKS

BY

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

jFtrat anto ^econU Series

IN THREE VOLUMES
VOLUME III

CAMBRIDGE

at tljr Htoersfae

MCMIV

COPYRIGHT 1870 AND 1876 BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

COPYRIGHT 1898 BY MABEL LOWELL BURNETT

COPYRIGHT 1904 BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

EDITION LIMITED TO ONE THOUSAND COPIES
THIS IS NUMBER .. Z%*

CONTENTS

DANTE ....... ,

WORDSWORTH . . . . . . ,7,

MILTON 243

KEATS 3,3

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL IN 1877 Frontispiece
From a photograph by Elliot and Fry

DANTE . 6

From a bas-relief at Ravenna by Pietro Lombardi,
1483. The photograph was loaned by Professor
Charles Eliot Norton

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH IN 1844 . .174
From the painting by Henry Inman in the posses
sion of the family

JOHN MILTON . . . . . .246

From the crayon drawing at Bayfordbury

JOHN KEATS 3,6

From the painting by Joseph Severn in the pos
session of Williams College, Williamstown, Massa
chusetts

DANTE

DANTE1

1872

ON the banks of a little river so shrunken
by the suns of summer that it seems
fast passing into a tradition, but so
swollen by the autumnal rains with Italian sud
denness of passion that the massy bridge shud
ders under the impatient heap of waters behind
it, stands a city which, in its period of bloom not
so large as Boston, may well rank next to Athens
in the history which teaches come F uom s' eterna.
Originally only a convenient spot in the val
ley where the fairs of the neighboring Etruscan
city of Fiesole were held, it gradually grew from
a huddle of booths to a town, and then to a city,
which absorbed its ancestral neighbor and be
came a cradle for the arts, the letters, the science,
and the commerce 2 of modern Europe. For her

1 The Shadow of Dante t being an Essay towards studying
Himself, his World, and his Pilgrimage. By Maria Francesca
Rossetti.

" Se Dio te lasci, letter, prender frutto
Di tua lezione."

Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1872. 8vo, pp. 296.

* The Florentines should seem to have invented or re-in
vented banks, book-keeping by double-entry, and bills of ex-

4 DANTE

Cimabue wrought, who infused Byzantine for
malism with a suggestion of nature and feeling ;
for her the Pisani, who divined at least, if they
could not conjure with it, the secret of Greek su
premacy in sculpture ; for her the marvellous boy
Ghiberti proved that unity of composition and
grace of figure and drapery were never beyond
the reach of genius ; ' for her Brunelleschi curved
the dome which Michael Angelo hung in air on
St. Peter's ; for her Giotto reared the bell-tower
graceful as an Horatian ode in marble ; and the
great triumvirate of Italian poetry, good sense,
and culture called her mother. There is no mod
ern city about which cluster so many elevating
associations, none in which the past is so con
temporary with us in unchanged buildings and

change. The last, by endowing Value with the gift of fern-
seed and enabling it to walk invisible, turned the flank of the
baronial tariff system and made the roads safe for the great
liberalizer, Commerce. This made Money omnipresent, and
prepared the way for its present omnipotence. Fortunately it
cannot usurp the third attribute of Deity, — omniscience. But
whatever the consequences, this Florentine invention was at
first nothing but admirable, securing to brain its legitimate in
fluence over brawn. The latter has begun its revolt, but
whether it will succeed better in its attempt to restore mediae
val methods than the barons in maintaining them remains to
be seen.

1 Ghiberti' s designs have been criticised by a too systematic
asstheticism, as confounding the limits of sculpture and paint
ing. But is not the rilievo precisely the bridge by which the
one art passes over into the territory of the other ?

DANTE 5

undisturbed monuments. The house of Dante
is still shown ; children still receive baptism at
the font (/'/ mio bel San Giovanni) where he was
christened before the acorn dropped that was to
grow into a keel for Columbus; and an inscribed
stone marks the spot where he used to sit and
watch the slow blocks swing up to complete the
master-thought of Arnolfo. In the convent of
St. Mark hard by lived and labored Beato An-
gelico, the saint of Christian art, and Fra Barto-
lommeo, who taught Raphael dignity. From
the same walls Savonarola went forth to his tri
umphs, short-lived almost as the crackle of his
martyrdom. The plain little chamber of Michael
Angelo seems still to expect his return ; his last
sketches lie upon the table, his staff leans in the
corner, and his slippers wait before the empty
chair. On one of the vine-clad hills, just with
out the city walls, one's feet may press the same
stairs that Milton climbed to visit Galileo. To
an American there is something supremely im
pressive in this cumulative influence of a past
full of inspiration and rebuke, something sad
dening in this repeated proof that moral supre
macy is the only one that leaves monuments and
not ruins behind it. Time, who with us oblit
erates the labor and often the names of yester
day, seems here to have spared almost the prints
of the care piante that shunned the sordid paths
of worldly honor.

6 DANTE

Around the courtyard of the great Museum
of Florence stand statues of her illustrious dead,
her poets, painters, sculptors, architects, invent
ors, and statesmen ; and as the traveller feels
the ennobling lift of such society, and reads the
names or recognizes the features familiar to him
as his own threshold, he is startled to find Fame
as commonplace here as Notoriety everywhere
else, and that this fifth-rate city should have the
privilege thus to commemorate so many famous
men her sons, whose claim to preeminence the
whole world would concede. Among them is
one figure before which every scholar, every man
who has been touched by the tragedy of life,
lingers with reverential pity. The haggard
cheeks, the lips clamped together in unfalter
ing resolve, the scars of lifelong battle, and the
brow whose stern outline seems the trophy of
final victory, — this, at least, is a face that needs
no name beneath it. This is he who among lit
erary fames finds only two that for growth and
immutability can parallel his own. The suf
frages of highest authority would now place him
second in that company where he with proud
humility took the sixth place.1

Dante (Durante, by contraction Dante) degli
Alighieri was born at Florence in 1265, prob
ably during the month of May.a This is the

1 Inferno , iv. 102.

a The Nouvelle Biographie Generate gives May 8 as his

DANTE 7

date given by Boccaccio, who is generally fol
lowed, though he makes a blunder in saying,
sedendo Urbano quarto nella cattedra di San
Pietro, for Urban died in October, 1264. Some,
misled by an error in a few of the early manu
script copies of the " Divina Commedia," would
have him born five years earlier, in 1260. Ac
cording to Arrivabene,1 Sansovino was the first
to confirm Boccaccio's statement by the authority
of the poet himself, basing his argument on the
first verse of the " Inferno," —

" Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita "; —

the average age of man having been declared by
the Psalmist to be seventy years, and the period
of the poet's supposed vision being unequiv
ocally fixed at 1300.* Leonardo Aretino and
Manetti add their testimony to that of Boccac
cio, and 1265 is now universally assumed as the
true date.3 Voltaire, nevertheless, places the

birthday. This is a mere assumption, for Boccaccio only says
generally May. The indication which Dante himself gives
that he was born when the sun was in Gemini would give a
range from about the middle of May to about the middle of
June, so that the 8th is certainly too early.

1 Secolo di Dante, Udine edition of 1828, vol. iii. part i.
p. 578.

2 Arrivabene, however, is wrong. Boccaccio makes pre
cisely the same reckoning in the first note of his Commentary
(Bocc. ComentOj etc., Firenze, 1844, vol. i. pp. 32, 33).

3 Diet. Phil. art. "Dante.'*

8 DANTE

poet's birth in 1260, and jauntily forgives Bayle
(who, he says, tcrivait a Rotterdam currente
calamo pour son libraire) for having been right,
declaring that he esteems him neither more nor
less for having made a mistake of five years.
Oddly enough, Voltaire adopts this alleged
blunder of five years on the next page, in say
ing that Dante died at the age of fifty-six,
though he still more oddly omits the undisputed
date of his death (1321), which would have
shown Bayle to be right. The poet's descent
is said to have been derived from a younger son
of the great Roman family of the Frangipani,
classed by the popular rhyme with the Orsini
and Colonna: —

«« Colonna, Orsini, e Frangipani,
Prendono oggi e pagano domani."

That his ancestors had been long established in
Florence is an inference from some expressions
of the poet, and from their dwelling having been
situated in the more ancient part of the city.
The most important fact of the poet's genealogy
is, that he was of mixed race, the Alighieri being
of Teutonic origin. Dante was born, as he him
self tells us,1 when the sun was in the constella
tion Gemini, and it has been absurdly inferred,
from a passage in the " Inferno," 2 that his horo
scope was drawn and a great destiny predicted
for him by his teacher, Brunette Latini. The
1 Paradiso, xxu. a Canto xv.

DANTE 9

" Ottimo Comento " tells us that the Twins are
the house of Mercury, who induces in men the
faculty of writing, science, and of acquiring
knowledge. This is worth mentioning as char
acteristic of the age and of Dante himself, with
whom the influence of the stars took the place
of the old notion of destiny.1 It is supposed,
from a passage in Boccaccio's life of Dante, that
Alighiero the father was still living when the
poet was nine years old. If so, he must have
died soon after, for Leonardo Aretino, who
wrote with original documents before him, tells
us that Dante lost his father while yet a child.
This circumstance may have been not without
influence in muscularizing his nature to that
character of self-reliance which shows itself so
constantly and sharply during his after-life. His
tutor was Brunette Latini, a very superior man
(for that age), says Aretino parenthetically. Like
Alexander Gill, he is now remembered only as
the schoolmaster of a great poet, and that he
did his duty well may be inferred from Dante's
speaking of him gratefully as one who by times
" taught him how man eternizes himself." This,
and what Villani says of his refining the Tuscan
idiom (for so we understand his farli scorti in
bene parlare 2 ) are to be noted as of probable

1 Purgatorio, xvi.

2 Though he himself preferred French, and wrote his Li
Tresors in that language for two reasons, " /' una perche noi

io DANTE

influence on the career of his pupil. Of the order
of Dante's studies nothing can be certainly
affirmed. His biographers send him to Bologna,
Padua, Paris, Naples, and even Oxford. All are
doubtful, Paris and Oxford most of all, and the
dates utterly undeterminable. Yet all are pos
sible, nay, perhaps probable. Bologna and
Padua we should be inclined to place before his
exile ; Paris and Oxford, if at all, after it. If no
argument in favor of Paris is to be drawn from
his Pape Satan ' and the corresponding paix,
paix, Sathan, in the autobiography of Cellini,
nor from the very definite allusion to Doctor
Sigier,2 we may yet infer from some passages
in the " Commedia " that his wanderings had
extended even farther ; 3 for it would not be
hard to show that his comparisons and illustra
tions from outward things are almost invariably
drawn from actual eyesight. As to the nature
of his studies, there can be no doubt that he
went through the trivium (grammar, dialectic,
rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music,
geometry, and astronomy) of the then ordinary
university course. To these he afterward added

siamo in Francia, e I* altra per c he la parlatura francesca e
piu dilettevole e piu comune che tutti li altri linguaggi."
( Proemio, sul fine. )

1 Inferno, canto vn. * Paradiso, canto x.

3 See especially Inferno, ix. 112 et seq.; xn. 120; xv. 4
et seq.; xxxn. 25-30.

DANTE 1 1

painting (or at least drawing, — disegnava un
angelo sopra certe tavolette1), theology, and med
icine. He is said to have been the pupil of
Cimabue, and was certainly the friend of Giotto,
the designs for some of whose frescos at Assisi
and elsewhere have been wrongly attributed to
him, though we may safely believe in his help
ful comment and suggestion. To prove his love
of music, the episode of Casella were enough,
even without Boccaccio's testimony. The range
of Dante's study and acquirement would be
encyclopaedic in any age, but at that time it was
literally possible to master the omne scibile, and
he seems to have accomplished it. How lofty
his theory of science was, is plain from this
passage in the "Convito" : " He is not to be
called a true lover of wisdom (filosofo) who loves
it for the sake of gain, as do lawyers, physicians,
and almost all churchmen (//' religiosi)ywho study,
not in order to know, but to acquire riches or
advancement, and who would not persevere in
study should you give them what they desire to
gain by it. ... And it may be said that (as
true friendship between men consists in each
wholly loving the other) the true philosopher
loves every part of wisdom, and wisdom every
part of the philosopher, inasmuch as she draws
all to herself, and allows no one of his thoughts
to wander to other things." a The " Convito "

1 Vita Nuova, c. xxxv. * Tratt. HI. cap. xi.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

12 DANTE

gives us a glance into Dante's library. We find
Aristotle (whom he calls the philosopher, the
master) cited seventy-six times ; Cicero, eight
een; Albertus Magnus, seven; Boethius, six;
Plato (at second hand), four ; Aquinas, Avi-
cenna, Ptolemy, the Digest, Lucan, and Ovid,
three each; Virgil, Juvenal, Statius, Seneca, and
Horace, twice each ; and Algazzali, Alfrogan,
Augustine, Livy, Orosius, and Homer (at second
hand), once. Of Greek he seems to have under
stood little ; of Hebrew and Arabic, perhaps
more. But it was not only in the closet and from
books that Dante received his education. He
acquired, perhaps, the better part of it in the
streets of Florence, and later, in those homeless
wanderings which led him (as he says) wherever
the Italian tongue was spoken. His were the
only open eyes of that century, and, as nothing
escaped them, so there is nothing that was not
photographed upon his sensitive brain, to be
afterward fixed forever in the " Commedia."
What Florence was during his youth and man
hood, with its Guelphs and Ghibellines, its
nobles and trades, its Bianchi and Neri, its
kaleidoscopic revolutions, " all parties loving
liberty and doing their best to destroy her," as
Voltaire says, it would be beyond our province
to tell even if we could. Foreshortened as
events are when we look back on them across
so many ages, only the upheavals of party con-

DANTE 13

flict catching the eye, while the spaces of peace
between sink out of the view of history, a
whole century seems like a mere wild chaos.
Yet during a couple of such centuries the cathe
drals of Florence, Pisa, and Siena got built;
Cimabue, Giotto, Arnolfo, thePisani, Brunelles-
chi, and Ghiberti gave the impulse to modern
art, or brought it in some of its branches to
its culminating point; modern literature took
its rise ; commerce became a science, and the
middle class came into being. It was a time
of fierce passions and sudden tragedies, of pic
turesque transitions and contrasts. It found
Dante, shaped him by every experience that
life is capable of, — rank, ease, love, study,
affairs, statecraft, hope, exile, hunger, depend
ence, despair, — until he became endowed with
a sense of the nothingness of this world's goods
possible only to the rich, and a knowledge of
man possible only to the poor. The few well-
ascertained facts of Dante's life may be briefly
stated. In 1274 occurred what we may call his
spiritual birth, the awakening in him of the
imaginative faculty, and of that profounder and
more intense consciousness which springs from
the recognition of beauty through the antithesis
of sex. It was in that year that he first saw
Beatrice Portinari. In 1289 he was present at
the battle of Campaldino, fighting on the side
of the Guelphs who there utterly routed the

14 DANTE

Ghibellines, and where, he says characteristically
enough, " I was present, not a boy in arms, and
where I felt much fear, but in the end the great
est pleasure, from the various changes of the
fight." ' In the same year he assisted at the
siege and capture of Caprona.2 In 1290 died
Beatrice, married to Simone dei Bardi, precisely
when is uncertain, but before 1287, as appears
by a mention of her in her father's will, bearing
date January 15 of that year. Dante's own
marriage is assigned to various years, ranging
from 1291 to 1294; but the earlier date seems
the more probable, as he was the father of seven
children (the youngest, a daughter, named Bea
trice) in 1301. His wife was Gemma dei Donati,
and through her Dante, whose family, though
noble, was of the lesser nobility, became nearly
connected with Corso Donati, the head of a
powerful clan of the grandly or greater nobles.
In 1293 occurred what is called the revolution
of Gian Delia Bella, in which the priors of the
trades took the power into their own hands, and
made nobility a disqualification for office. A
noble was defined to be any one who counted
a knight among his ancestors, and thus the
descendant of Cacciaguida was excluded.

Delia Bella was exiled in 1295, but the nobles
did not regain their power. On the contrary,

1 Letter of Dante, now lost, cited by Aretino.

2 Inferno, xxi. 94.

DANTE 15

the citizens, having all their own way, pro
ceeded to quarrel among themselves, and sub
divided into the popolani grossi and popolani
minuti) or greater and lesser trades, — a dis
tinction of gentility somewhat like that between
wholesale and retail tradesmen. The grandi con
tinuing turbulent, many of the lesser nobility,
among them Dante, drew over to the side of the
citizens, and between 1297 and 1300 there is
found inscribed in the book of the physicians
and apothecaries, Dante d ' Aldighiero, degli Al-
dighieri, poet a Florentine.1 Professor de Veri-
cour thinks it necessary to apologize for this
lapse on the part of the poet, and gravely bids
us take courage, nor think that Dante was ever
an apothecary.2 In 1300 we find him elected
one of the priors of the city. In order to a per
fect misunderstanding of everything connected
with the Florentine politics of this period, one
has only to study the various histories. The
result is a spectrum on the mind's eye, which
looks definite and brilliant, but really hinders
all accurate vision, as if from too steady inspec
tion of a Catharine-wheel in full whirl. A few
words, however, are necessary, if only to make
the confusion palpable. The rival German fam
ilies of Welfs and Weiblingens had given their
names, softened into Guelfi and Ghibellini, —

1 Balbo, Vita di Dante y Firenze, 1853, p. IJ7'

2 Life and Times of Dante , London, 1858, p. 80.

1 6 DANTE

from which Gabriel Harvey T ingeniously, but
mistakenly, derives elves and goblins, — to two
parties in Northern Italy, representing respect
ively the adherents of the pope and of the em
peror, but serving very well as rallying-points
in all manner of intercalary and subsidiary quar
rels. The nobles, especially the greater ones,
— perhaps from instinct, perhaps in part from
hereditary tradition, as being more or less Teu
tonic by descent, — were commonly Ghibel-
lines, or Imperialists ; the bourgeoisie were very
commonly Guelphs, or supporters of the pope,
partly from natural antipathy to the nobles, and
partly, perhaps, because they believed them
selves to be espousing the more purely Italian
side. Sometimes, however, the party relation
of nobles and burghers to each other was re
versed, but the names of Guelph and Ghibelline
always substantially represented the same things.
The family of Dante had been Guelphic, and we
have seen him already as a young man serving
two campaigns against the other party. But no
immediate question as between pope and em
peror seems then to have been pending ; and
while there is no evidence that he was ever a
mere partisan, the reverse would be the infer
ence from his habits and character. Just before
his assumption of the priorate, however, a new
complication had arisen. A family feud, begin-
1 Notes to Spenser's Shepherd's Calendar.

DANTE 17

ning in the neighboring city of Pistoja, between
the Cancellieri Neri and Cancellieri Bianchi,1
had extended to Florence, where the Guelphs
took the part of the Neri and the Ghibellines
of the Bianchi.2 The city was instantly in a
ferment of street brawls, as actors in one of
which some of the Medici are incidentally
named, — the first appearance of that family
in history. Both parties appealed at different
times to the pope, who sent two ambassadors,
first a bishop and then a cardinal. Both paci
ficators soon flung out again in a rage, after
adding the new element of excommunication to
the causes of confusion. It was in the midst
of these things that Dante became one of the
six priors (June, 1300), — an office which the
Florentines had made bimestrial in its tenure,
in order apparently to secure at least six consti
tutional chances of revolution in the year. He
advised that the leaders of both parties should
be banished to the frontiers, which was forth
with done ; the ostracism including his rela
tive Corso Donati among the Neri, and his
most intimate friend the poet Guido Cavalcanti

1 See the story at length in Balbo, Vita di Dante, cap. x.

2 Thus Foscolo. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say
that at first the blacks were the extreme Guelphs, and the
whites those moderate Guelphs inclined to make terms with
the Ghibellines. The matter is obscure, and Balbo contradicts
himself about it.

1 8 DANTE

among the Bianchi. They were all permitted
to return before long (though after Dante's
term of office was over), and came accordingly,
bringing at least the Scriptural allowance of
" seven other " motives of mischief with them.
Affairs getting worse (1301), the Neri, with
the connivance of the pope (Boniface VIII.),
entered into an arrangement with Charles of
Valois, who was preparing an expedition to Italy.
Dante was meanwhile sent on an embassy to
Rome (September, 1301, according to Arriva-
bene,1 but probably earlier) by the Bianchi, who
still retained all the offices at Florence. It is
the tradition that he said in setting forth : " If
I go, who remains ? and if I stay, who goes ? "
Whether true or not, the story implies what
was certainly true, that the counsel and influ
ence of Dante were of great weight with the
more moderate of both parties. On October
31, 1301, Charles took possession of Florence
in the interest of the Neri. Dante being still at
Rome (January 27, 1302), sentence of exile was
pronounced against him and others, with a heavy
fine to be paid within two months ; if not paid,
the entire confiscation of goods, and, whether
paid or no, exile ; the charge against him being
pecuniary malversation in office. The fine not

1 Secolo di Dante, p. 654. He would seem to have been
in Rome during the Jubilee of 1300. See Inferno, xvm.
28-33.

DANTE 19

paid (as it could not be without admitting the
justice of the charges, which Dante scorned
even to deny), in less than two months (March
10, 1302) a second sentence was registered, by
which he with others was condemned to be
burned alive if taken within the boundaries of
the republic.1 From this time the life of Dante
becomes semi-mythical, and for nearly every
date we are reduced to the " as they say " of
Herodotus. He became now necessarily iden
tified with his fellow exiles (fragments of all
parties united by common wrongs in a practical,
if not theoretic, Ghibellinism), and shared in
their attempts to reinstate themselves by force
of arms. He was one of their council of twelve,
but withdrew from it on account of the un
wisdom of their measures. Whether he was
present at their futile assault on Florence (July
22, 1304) is doubtful, but probably he was not.
From the " Ottimo Comento," written at least
in part2 by a contemporary as early as 1333,
we learn that Dante soon separated himself
from his companions in misfortune with mutual

1 That Dante was not of the grandi, or great nobles (what
we call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to
make out, is plain from this sentence, where his name appears
low on the list and with no ornamental prefix, after half a
dozen domini. Bayle, however, is equally wrong in supposing
his family to have been obscure.

2 See Witte, Quando e da chi sia composto /' Ottimo Co
mento, etc. (Leipzig, 1847.)

20 DANTE

discontents and recriminations.1 During the
nineteen years of Dante's exile, it would be hard
to say where he was not. In certain districts
of Northern Italy there is scarce a village that
has not its tradition of him, its sedia, roccay
spelonca, or torre di Dante ; and what between
the patriotic complaisance of some biographers
overwilling to gratify as many provincial vani
ties as possible, and the pettishness of others
anxious only to snub them, the confusion be
comes hopeless.2 After his banishment we find
some definite trace of him first at Arezzo with
Uguccione della Faggiuola ; then at Siena ; then
at Verona with the Scaligeri. He himself says:
" Through almost all parts where this language
[Italian] is spoken, a wanderer, well-nigh a
beggar, I have gone, showing against my will
the wound of fortune. Truly I have been a

1 Oft. Com. Parad. xvn.

2 The loose way in which many Italian scholars write his
tory is as amazing as it is perplexing. For example : Count
Balbo's Life of Dante was published originally at Turin, in
1839. In a note (lib. i. cap. x.) he expresses a doubt
whether the date of Dante's banishment should not be 1303,
and inclines to think it should be. Meanwhile, it seems never
to have occurred to him to employ some one to look at the
original decree, still existing in the archives. Stranger still,
Le Monnier, reprinting the work at Florence in 1853, within
a stone' s-throw of the document itself, and with full permis
sion from Balbo to make corrections, leaves the matter just
where it was.

DANTE 21

vessel without sail or rudder, driven to diverse
ports, estuaries, and shores by that hot blast,
the breath of grievous poverty ; and I have
shown myself to the eyes of many who per
haps, through some fame of me, had imagined
me in quite other guise, in whose view not only
was my person debased, but every work of
mine, whether done or yet to do, became of
less account." * By the election of the Emperor
Henry VII. (of Luxemburg, November, 1308),
and the news of his proposed expedition into
Italy, the hopes of Dante were raised to the
highest pitch. Henry entered Italy, October,
13 10, and received the iron crown of Lombardy
at Milan, on the day of Epiphany, 1311. His
movements being slow, and his policy unde
cided, Dante addressed him that famous let
ter, urging him to crush first the " Hydra and
Myrrha " Florence, as the root of all the evils
of Italy (April 1 6, 1311). To this year we must
probably assign the new decree by which the
seigniory of Florence recalled a portion of the
exiles, excepting Dante, however, among others,
by name.2 The undertaking of Henry, after an

1 Convito, tratt. i. cap. iii.

2 Macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly
cited in the preface to the Udine edition of the Codex Barto-
linianus as placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such
thing, but expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310.
(See Macch. Op. ed. Baretti, London, 1772, vol. i. p. 60.)

22 DANTE

ill-directed dawdling of two years, at last ended
in his death at Buonconvento (August 24, 1313;
Carlyle says wrongly September) ; poisoned, it
was said, in the sacramental bread, by a Domini
can friar, bribed thereto by Florence.1 The story
is doubtful, the more as Dante nowhere alludes
to it, as he certainly would have done had he
heard of it. According to Balbo, Dante spent
the time from August, 1313, to November,
1314, in Pisa and Lucca, and then took refuge
at Verona, with Can Grande della Scala (whom
Voltaire calls, drolly enough, le grand-can de
Verone^ as if he had been a Tartar), where he
remained till 1318. Foscolo with equal positive-
ness sends him, immediately after the death of
Henry, to Guido da Polenta2 at Ravenna, and
makes him join Can Grande only after the latter
became captain of the Ghibelline league in De
cember, 1318. In 1316 the government of
Florence set forth a new decree allowing the
exiles to return on conditions of fine and pen
ance. Dante rejected the offer (by accepting
which his guilt would have been admitted), in

1 See Carlyle's Frederic, vol. i. p. 147.

2 A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna
till several years later. But Boccaccio also assigns 1313 as the
date of Dante's withdrawal to that city, and his first protector
may have been one of the other Polentani to whom Guido
(surnamed Novello, or the Younger; his grandfather having
borne the same name) succeeded.

DANTE 23

a letter still hot, after these five centuries, with
indignant scorn. " Is this then the glorious
return of Dante Alighieri to his country after
nearly three lustres of suffering and exile ? Did
an innocence, patent to all, merit this ? — this,
the perpetual sweat and toil of study ? Far from
a man, the housemate of philosophy, be so rash
and earthen-hearted a humility as to allow him
self to be offered up bound like a school-boy
or a criminal ! Far from a man, the preacher of
justice, to pay those who have done him wrong
as for a favor ! This is not the way of returning
to my country ; but if another can be found
that shall not derogate from the fame and honor
of Dante, that I will enter on with no lagging
steps. For if by none such Florence may be
entered, by me then never ! Can I not every
where behold the mirrors of the sun and stars,
speculate on sweetest truths under any sky, with
out first giving myself up inglorious, nay, igno
minious, to the populace and city of Florence ?
Nor shall I want for bread." Dionisi puts the
date of this letter in 1315.* He is certainly

1 Under this date (1315) a fourth condemnatio against
Dante is mentioned facto, in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per
D. Rainerium, D. Zacharii de Urbeveteri, olim et tune
vicar turn regium civitatis Florentiae, etc. It is found recited
in the decree under which in I 342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed
a portion of his father's property, to wit : Una possessions cum
vinea et cum domibus super eat combustis et non combustis,
posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnola. In the domibus com-

24 DANTE

wrong, for the decree is dated December n,

1316. Foscolo places it in 1316, Troya early in

1317, and both may be right, as the year began
March 25. Whatever the date of Dante's visit
to Voltaire's great Khan ' of Verona, or the
length of his stay with him, may have been, it
is certain that he was in Ravenna in 1320, and
that, on his return thither from an embassy to
Venice (concerning which a curious letter, forged
probably by Doni, is extant), he died on Sep
tember 14, 1321 (i3th, according to others).
He was buried at Ravenna under a monument
built by his friend, Guido Novello.2 Dante is

bustis we see the blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by mar
riage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of
the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city by Charles
ofValois. (See De Romanis, notes on Tiraboschi's Life of
Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1830, vol. v. p. 119.)

1 Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory
by Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the
Middle Ages, Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics
knew each other, and adds : // n'y a done pas trap a s* e tanner
des noms bizarres de Mastino et de Cane donn'es *a ces Delia
Scala. {Dante, heretique, r'evolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris,
1854, pp. 118-120.)

a If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted
by Balbo {Vitay i. lib. n. cap. xvii. ), whom De Vericour
copies without question, we are at a loss to account for the
preservation of the original epitaph replaced by Bernardo Bembo
when he built the new tomb, in 1483. Bembo' s own in
scription implies an already existing monument, and, if in dis
paraging terms, yet epitaphial Latin verses are not to be taken

DANTE 25

said to have dictated the following inscription
for it on his death-bed : —

JVRA MONARCHIAE SvPEROS PHLEGETHONTA LACVSQVE
LVSTRANDO CECINI VOLVERVNT FATA QVOVSQVE
SED QVIA PARS CESSIT MELIORIBVS HOSPITA CASTRIS
AvCTOREMQVE SWM PETIIT FELICIOR ASTRIS

Hie CLAVDOR DANTES PATRIIS EXTORRIS AB ORIS

QVEM GENVIT PARVI FLORENTIA MATER AMORIS.

Of which this rude paraphrase may serve as a
translation : —

The rights of Monarchy, the Heavens, the Stream of Fire,

the Pit,

In vision seen, I sang as far as to the Fates seemed fit;
But since my soul, an alien here, hath flown to nobler wars,
And, happier now, hath gone to seek its Maker 'mid the stars,
Here am I Dante shut, exiled from the ancestral shore,
Whom Florence, the of all least-loving mother, bore.1

too literally, considering the exigencies of that branch of liter
ary ingenuity. The doggerel Latin has been thought by some
unworthy of Dante, as Shakespeare's doggerel English epitaph
has been thought unworthy of him. In both cases the rude
ness of the verses seems to us a proof of authenticity. An en
lightened posterity with unlimited superlatives at command,
and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, would have
aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It is certain,
at least in Dante's case, that Bembo would never have inserted
in the very first words an allusion to the De Monarchia, a
book long before condemned as heretical.

1 We have translated lacusque by " the Pit," as being the
nearest English correlative. Dante probably meant by it the
several circles of his Hell, narrowing, one beneath the other,
to the centre. As a curious specimen of English we subjoin
Professor de Vericour's translation: " I have sang the rights

26 DANTE

If these be not the words of Dante, what
is internal evidence worth ? The indomitably
self-reliant man, loyal first of all to his most
unpopular convictions (his very host, Guido,
being a Guelph), puts his Ghibellinism (jura
monarchiae) in the front. The man whose whole
life, like that of selected souls always, had been
a warfare, calls heaven another camp, — a better
one, thank God ! The wanderer of so many
years speaks of his soul as a guest, — glad to
be gone, doubtless. The exile, whose sharpest
reproaches of Florence are always those of an
outraged lover, finds it bitter that even his un
conscious bones should lie in alien soil.

Giovanni Villani, the earliest authority, and a
contemporary, thus sketches him : " This man
was a great scholar in almost every science,
though a layman ; was a most excellent poet,
philosopher, and rhetorician ; perfect, as well in
composing and versifying as in haranguing ;
a most noble speaker. . . . This Dante, on
account of his learning, was a little haughty,
and shy, and disdainful, and like a philosopher

of monarchy; I have sang, in exploring them, the abode of
God, the Phlegethon and the impure lakes, as long as desti
nies have permitted. But as the part of myself, which was
only passing, returns to better fields, and happier, returned to
his Maker, I, Dante, exiled from the regions of fatherland,
I am laid here, I, to whom Florence gave birth, a mother who
experienced but a feeble love." (The Life and Times of
Dante t London, 1858, p. 208.)

DANTE 27

almost ungracious, knew not well how to deal
with unlettered folk." Benvenuto da Imola tells
us that he was very abstracted, as we may well
believe of a man who carried the " Commedia "
in his brain. Boccaccio paints him in this wise :
" Our poet was of middle height ; his face was
long, his nose aquiline, his jaw large, and the
lower lip protruding somewhat beyond the up
per ; a little stooping in the shoulders ; his eyes
rather large than small ; dark of complexion ;
his hair and beard thick, crisp, and black ; and
his countenance always sad and thoughtful. His
garments were always dignified ; the style such
as suited ripeness of years ; his gait was grave
and gentlemanlike ; and his bearing, whether
public or private, wonderfully composed and
polished. In meat and drink he was most tem
perate, nor was ever any more zealous in study
or whatever other pursuit. Seldom spake he,
save when spoken to, though a most eloquent
person. In his youth he delighted especially in
music and singing, and was intimate with almost
all the singers and musicians of his day. He was
much inclined to solitude, and familiar with few,
and most assiduous in study as far as he could
find time for it. Dante was also of marvellous
capacity and the most tenacious memory." Va
rious anecdotes of him are related by Boccaccio,
Sacchetti, and others, none of them verisimilar,
and some of them at least fifteen centuries old

28 DANTE

when revamped. Most of them are neither vert
nor ben trovati. One clear glimpse we get of
him from the " Ottimo Comento," the author
of which says : * " I, the writer, heard Dante say
that never a rhyme had led him to say other than
he would, but that many a time and oft (molte e
spesse volte) he had made words say for him what
they were not wont to express for other poets."
That is the only sincere glimpse we get of the
living, breathing, word-compelling Dante.

Looked at outwardly, the life of Dante seems
to have been an utter and disastrous failure.
What its inward satisfactions must have been,
we, with the " Paradiso " open before us, can
form some faint conception. To him, longing
with an intensity which only the word Dantesque
will express to realize an ideal upon earth, and
continually baffled and misunderstood, the far
greater part of his mature life must have been
labor and sorrow. We can see how essential all
that sad experience was to him, can understand
why all the fairy stories hide the luck in the
ugly black casket ; but to him, then and there,
how seemed it?

Thou shalt relinquish everything of thee,
Beloved most dearly; this that arrow is
Shot from the bow of exile first of all;
And thou shalt prove how salt a savor hath
The bread of others, and how hard a path
To climb and to descend the stranger's stairs !2

1 Inferno, x. 85. 3 Paradiso, xvn.

DANTE 29

Come sa di sale. Who never wet his bread with
tears, says Goethe, knows ye not, ye heavenly
powers ! Our nineteenth century made an idol
of the noble lord who broke his heart in verse
once every six months, but the fourteenth was
lucky enough to produce and not to make an
idol of that rarest earthly phenomenon, a man
of genius who could hold heartbreak at bay for
twenty years, and would not let himself die till
he had done his task. At the end of the " Vita
Nuova," his first work, Dante wrote down that
remarkable aspiration that God would take him
to himself after he had written of Beatrice such
things as were never yet written of woman. It
was literally fulfilled when the " Commedia "
was finished twenty-five years later.

Scarce was Dante at rest in his grave when
Italy felt instinctively that this was her great
man. Boccaccio tells us that in 1329 * Cardinal
Poggetto (du Poiet) caused Dante's treatise " De
Monarchia " to be publicly burned at Bologna,
and proposed further to dig up and burn the
bones of the poet at Ravenna, as having been
a heretic ; but so much opposition was roused
that he thought better of it. Yet this was during
the pontificate of the Frenchman, John XXII.,
whose damnation the poet himself seems to

1 He says after the return of Louis of Bavaria to Germany,
which took place in that year. The De Monarchia was after
ward condemned by the Council of Trent.

30 DANTE

prophesy,1 and against whose election he had
endeavored to persuade the cardinals, in a vehe
ment letter. In 1350 the republic of Florence
voted the sum of ten golden florins to be paid
by the hands of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio to
Dante's daughter Beatrice, a nun in the convent
of Santa Chiara at Ravenna. In 1396 Florence
voted a monument, and begged in vain for the
metaphorical ashes of the man of whom she had
threatened to make literal cinders if she could
catch him alive. In 1429 2 she begged again, but
Ravenna, a dead city, was tenacious of the dead
poet. In 1519 Michael Angelo would have built
the monument, but Leo X. refused to allow the
sacred dust to be removed. Finally, in 1829,
five hundred and eight years after the death of
Dante, Florence got a cenotaph fairly built in
Santa Croce (by Ricci), ugly beyond even the
usual lot of such, with three colossal figures on
it, Dante in the middle, with Italy on one side
and Poesy on the other. The tomb at Ravenna,
built originally in 1483, by the father of Cardinal
Bembo, was restored by Cardinal Corsi in 1692,
and finally rebuilt in its present form by Cardinal
Gonzaga in 1780, all three of whom commemo
rated themselves in Latin inscriptions. It is a
little shrine covered with a dome, not unlike the

1 Inferno, xi. 50.

2 See the letter in Gaye, Carteggio inedito d* artisti
(Firenze, 1839), vol. i. p. 123.

DANTE 31

tomb of a Mohammedan saint, and is now the
chief magnet which draws foreigners and their
gold to Ravenna. The valet de -place says that
Dante is not buried under it, but beneath the
pavement of the street in front of it, where also,
he says, he saw my Lord Byron kneel and weep.
Like everything in Ravenna, it is dirty and neg
lected.

In 1373 (August 9) Florence instituted a
chair of the " Divina Commedia," and Boccac
cio was named first professor. He accordingly
began his lectures on Sunday, October 3, fol
lowing, but his comment was broken off abruptly
at the 1 7th verse of the jyth canto of the " In
ferno " by the illness which ended in his death,
December 21, 1375. Among his successors were
Filippo Villani and Filelfo. Bologna was the
first to follow the example of Florence, Benve-
nuto da Imola having begun his lectures, accord
ing to Tiraboschi, so early as 1375. Chairs were
established also at Pisa, Venice, Piacenza, and
Milan before the close of the century. The lec
tures were delivered in the churches and on
feast-days, which shows their popular character.
Balbo reckons (but this, though probable, is
guess-work) that the MS. copies of the " Divina
Commedia " made during the fourteenth century,
and now existing in the libraries of Europe, are
more numerous than those of all other works,
ancient and modern, made during the same

32 DANTE

period. Between the invention of printing and
the year 1500 more than twenty editions were
published in Italy, the earliest in 1472. During
the sixteenth century there were forty editions ;
during the seventeenth, — a period, for Italy,
of sceptical dilettantism, — only three; during
the eighteenth, thirty-four ; and already, during
the first half of the nineteenth, at least eighty.
The first translation was into Catalan, in 1428.'
M. Saint-Rene Taillandier says that the " Corn-
media'* was condemned by the Inquisition in
Spain ; but this seems too general a statement,
for, according to Foscolo,2 it was the commen
tary of Landino and Vellutello, and a few verses
in the "Inferno" and " Paradiso," which were
condemned. The first French translation was
that of Grangier, 1596, but the study of Dante
struck no root there till the present century.
Rivarol, who translated the " Inferno "in 1783,
was the first Frenchman who divined the won
derful force and vitality of the "Commedia."3
The expressions of Voltaire represent very well
the average opinion of cultivated persons in
respect of Dante in the middle of the eighteenth
century. He says : " The Italians call him
divine ; but it is a hidden divinity ; few people

1 Saint-Rene Taillandier, in Revue des Deux Mondes, De
cember i, 1856, says into Spanish.
a Dante, vol. iv. p. 116.
3 Sainte-Beuve, Cauteries du Lundi, tome xi. p. 169.

DANTE 33

understand his oracles. He has commentators,
which, perhaps, is another reason for his not
being understood. His reputation will go on
increasing, because scarce anybody reads him."1
To Father Bettinelli he writes : " I estimate
highly the courage with which you have dared
to say that Dante was a madman and his work
a monster." But he adds, what shows that Dante
had his admirers even in that flippant century :
" There are found amongus, and in the eighteenth
century, people who strive to admire imagina
tions so stupidly extravagant and barbarous." 2
Elsewhere he says that the " Commedia " was
" an odd poem, but gleaming with natural beau
ties, a work in which the author rose in parts
above the bad taste of his age and his subject,
and full of passages written as purely as if they
had been of the time of Ariosto and Tasso." 3
It is curious to see this antipathetic fascination
which Dante exercised over a nature so oppo
site to his own.

At the beginning of this century Chateau
briand speaks of Dante with vague commenda
tion, evidently from a very superficial acquaint
ance, and that only with the " Inferno," probably
from Rivarol's version.4 Since then there have

' Diet. Phil. art. "Dante."
3 Corresp. gen. (Euvres, tome Ivii. pp. 80, 81.
3 Essai sur les maeurs, CEuvres, tome xvii. pp. 371, 372.
* Genie du Christianisme, cap. iv.
v

34 DANTE

been four or five French versions in prose or
verse, including one by Lamennais. But the
austerity of Dante will not condescend to the
conventional elegance which makes the charm
of French, and the most virile of poets cannot
be adequately rendered in the most feminine of
languages. Yet in the works of Fauriel, Ozanam,
Ampere, and Villemain, France has given a
greater impulse to the study of Dante than any
other country except Germany. Into Germany
the " Commedia " penetrated later. How utterly
Dante was unknown there in the sixteenth cen
tury is plain from a passage in the " Vanity of
the Arts and Sciences " of Cornelius Agrippa,
where he is spoken of among the authors of
lascivious stories : " There have been many
of these historical pandars, of which some of
obscure fame, as ./Eneas Sylvius, Dantes, and
Petrarch, Boccace, Pontanus," etc.1 The first
German translation was that of Bachenschwanz
(1767-69). Versions by Kannegiesser, Streck-
fuss, Kopisch, and Prince John of Saxony, fol
lowed. Goethe seems never to have given that
attention to Dante which his ever-alert intelli
gence might have been expected to bestow on
so imposing a moral and aesthetic phenomenon.
Unless the conclusion of the second part of
" Faust " be an inspiration of the " Paradiso,"
we remember no adequate word from him on
1 Ed. London, 1684, p. 199.

DANTE 35

this theme. His remarks on one of the German
translations are brief, dry, and without that
breadth which comes only of thorough know
ledge and sympathy. But German scholarship
and constructive criticism, through Witte, Ko-
pisch, Wegele, Ruth, and others, have been of
preeminent service in deepening the understand
ing and facilitating the study of the poet. In
England the first recognition of Dante is by
Chaucer in the " Hugelin of Pisa " of the
" Monkes Tale," x and an imitation of the open
ing verses of the third canto of the " Inferno "
(" Assembly of Foules "). In 1417 Giovanni da
Serravalle, bishop of Fermo, completed a Latin
prose translation of the " Commedia," a copy
of which, as he made it at the request of two
English bishops whom he met at the Council
of Constance, was doubtless sent to England.
Later we find Dante now and then mentioned,
but evidently from hearsay only,2 till the time of
Spenser, who, like Milton fifty years later, shows

1 It is worth notice, as a proof of Chaucer's critical judg
ment, that he calls Dante " the great poet of Itaille," while
in the " Clerke's Tale " he speaks of Petrarch as a " worthy
clerk," as '"the laureat poete" (alluding to the somewhat
sentimental ceremony at Rome), and says that his

' ' Rhetorike sweete
Enlumined all Itaille of poetry. "

2 It is probable that Sackville may have read the Inferno,
and it is certain that Sir John Harrington liad. See the pre
face to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

36 DANTE

that he had read his works closely. Thencefor
ward for more than a century Dante became a
mere name, used without meaning by literary
sciolists. Lord Chesterfield echoes Voltaire, and
Dr. Drake in his " Literary H ours ' ' ' could speak
of Darwin's " Botanic Garden " as showing the
" wild and terrible sublimity of Dante ! " The
first complete English translation was by Boyd,
— of the " Inferno " in 1785, of the whole poem
in 1802. There have been eight other complete
translations, beginning with Gary's in 1814, six
since 1850, beside several of the " Inferno "
singly. Of these that of Longfellow is the best.
It is only within the last twenty years, how
ever, that the study of Dante, in any true sense,
became at all general. Even Coleridge seems
to have been familiar only with the " Inferno."
In America Professor Ticknor was the first to
devote a special course of illustrative lectures to
Dante ; he was followed by Longfellow, whose
lectures, illustrated by admirable translations,
are remembered with grateful pleasure by many
who were thus led to learn the full significance
of the great Christian poet. A translation of the
" Inferno " into quatrains by T. W. Parsons
ranks with the best for spirit, faithfulness, and
elegance. In Denmark and Russia translations
of the "Inferno" have been published, beside
separate volumes of comment and illustration.
1 Second edition, 1800.

DANTE 37

We have thus sketched the steady growth of
Dante's fame and influence to a universality
unparalleled except in the case of Shakespeare,
perhaps more remarkable if we consider the
abstruse and mystical nature of his poetry. It is
to be noted as characteristic that the veneration
of Dantophilists for their master is that of dis
ciples for their saint. Perhaps no other man
could have called forth such an expression as
that of Ruskin, that " the central man of all the
world, as representing in perfect balance the
imaginative, moral, and intellectual faculties, all
at their highest, is Dante."

The first remark to be made upon the writ
ings of Dante is that they are all (with the pos
sible exception of the treatise " De Vulgar!
Eloquio" ) autobiographic, and that all of them,
including that, are parts of a mutually related
system, of which the central point is the individ
uality and experience of the poet. In the " Vita
Nuova " he recounts the story of his love for
Beatrice Portinari, showing how his grief for her
loss turned his thoughts first inward upon his
own consciousness, and, failing all help there,
gradually upward through philosophy to reli
gion, and so from a world of shadows to one
of eternal substances. It traces with exquisite
unconsciousness the gradual but certain steps
by which memory and imagination transubstan
tiated the woman of flesh and blood into a holv

38 DANTE

ideal, combining in one radiant symbol of sor
row and hope that faith which is the instinct
ive refuge of unavailing regret, that grace of
God which higher natures learn to find in the
trial which passeth all understanding, and that
perfect womanhood, the dream of youth and
the memory of maturity, which beckons toward
the forever unattainable. As a contribution
to the physiology of genius, no other book is
to be compared with the " Vita Nuova." It
is more important to the understanding of
Dante as a poet than any other of his works.
It shows him (and that in the midst of affairs
demanding practical ability and presence of
mind) capable of a depth of contemplative ab
straction equalling that of a Soofi who has passed
the fourth step of initiation. It enables us in
some sort to see how, from being the slave of
his imaginative faculty, he rose by self-culture
and force of will to that mastery of it which is
art. We comprehend the " Commedia " better
when we know that Dante could be an active,
clear-headed politician and a mystic at the same
time. Various dates have been assigned to the
composition of the "Vita Nuova." The earli
est limit is fixed by the death of Beatrice in
1290 (though some of the poems are of even
earlier date), and the book is commonly assumed
to have been finished by 1295; Foscolo says
1294. But Professor Karl Witte, a high au-

DANTE 39

thority, extends the term as far as 1300.' The
title of the book also, " Vita Nuova," has been
diversely interpreted. Mr. Garrow, who pub
lished an English version of it at Florence in
1846, entitles it the "Early Life of Dante."
Balbo understands it in the same way.2 But we
are strongly of the opinion that " New Life "
is the interpretation sustained by the entire
significance of the book itself.

His next work in order of date is the treatise
" De Monarchia." It has been generally taken
for granted that Dante was a Guelph in politics
up to the time of his banishment, and that out
of resentment he then became a violent Ghi-
belline. Not to speak of the consideration that
there is no author whose life and works present
so remarkable a unity and logical sequence as
those of Dante, Professor Witte has drawn
attention to a fact which alone is enough to
demonstrate that the " De Monarchia " was
written before 1300. That and the "Vita Nu-
ova " are the only works of Dante in which no
allusion whatever is made to his exile. That
bitter thought was continually present to him.
In the "Convito" it betrays itself often, and with
touching unexpectedness. Even in the treatise
" De Vulgari Eloquio," he takes as one of his

1 Dante A lighter ? s lyrische Gedichte, Leipzig, 1842,
theil ii. pp. 4-9.
« Pita, p. 97.

40 DANTE

examples of style : " I have most pity for those,
whosoever they are, that languish in exile, and
revisit their country only in dreams." We have
seen that the one decisive act of Dante's prior-
ate was to expel from Florence the chiefs of
both parties as the sowers of strife, and he tells
us (" Paradise," xvn.) that he had formed a
party by himself. The king of Saxony has well
defined his political theory as being " an ideal
Ghibellinism," l and he has been accused of
want of patriotism only by those short-sighted
persons who cannot see beyond their own par
ish. Dante's want of faith in freedom was of
the same kind with Milton's refusing (as Taci
tus had done before) to confound license with
liberty. The argument of the " De Monarchia "
is briefly this : As the object of the individual
man is the highest development of his faculties,
so is it also with men united in societies. But
the individual can only attain the highest de
velopment when all his powers are in absolute
subjection to the intellect, and society only
when it subjects its individual caprices to an
intelligent head. This is the order of nature,
as in families, and men have followed it in the
organization of villages, towns, cities. Again,
since God made man in his own image, men
and societies most nearly resemble him in pro
portion as they approach unity. But as in all
1 Comment on Paradiso, vi.

DANTE 41

societies questions must arise, so there is need
of a monarch for supreme arbiter. And only a
universal monarch can be impartial enough for
this, since kings of limited territories would al
ways be liable to the temptation of private ends.
With the internal policy of municipalities, com
monwealths, and kingdoms, the monarch would
have nothing to do, only interfering when there
was danger of an infraction of the general peace.
This is the doctrine of the first book, enforced
sometimes eloquently, always logically, and with
great fertility of illustration. It is an enlarge
ment of some of the obiter dicta of the " Con-
vito." The earnestness with which peace is
insisted on as a necessary postulate of civic well-
being shows what the experience had been out
of which Dante had constructed his theory. It
is to be looked on as a purely scholastic demon
stration of a speculative thesis, in which the
manifold exceptions and modifications essential
in practical application are necessarily left aside.
Dante almost forestalls the famous proposition
of Calvin, " that it is possible to conceive a
people without a prince, but not a prince with
out a people," when he says, Non enim gens
propter regem, sed e converse rex propter gentem.1

1 Jean de Meung had already said, —

" Ge n'en met hors rois ne prelas

Qu'il sunt tui serf au menu pueple."
(Roman de la Rose (ed. Meon), v. ii. pp. 78, 79.)

4* DANTE

And in his letter to the princess and peoples of
Italy on the coming of Henry VII., he bids
them " obey their prince, but so as freemen pre
serving their own constitutional forms." He
says also expressly : Animadvertendum sane,
quod cum dicitur humanum genus potest regi per
unum supremum principem, non sic intelligendum
est ut ab illo uno prodire possint municipia et leges
municipales. Habent namque nationes, regna, et
civitates inter se proprieties quas legibus differ-
entibus regulari oportet. Schlosser the historian
compares Dante's system with that of the
United States.1 It in some respects resembled
more the constitution of the Netherlands under
the supreme stadtholder, but parallels between
ideal and actual institutions are always unsatis
factory.2

The second book is very curious. In it Dante
endeavors to demonstrate the divine right of the
Roman Empire to universal sovereignty. One
of his arguments is, that Christ consented to be
born under the reign of Augustus ; another,
that he assented to the imperial jurisdiction in
allowing himself to be crucified under a decree
of one of its courts. The atonement could not
have been accomplished unless Christ suffered
under sentence of a court having jurisdiction,
for otherwise his condemnation would have been

1 Dame, Studien, etc. 1855, p. 144.

2 Compare also Spinoza, Tractat. polit. cap. vi.

DANTE 43

an injustice and not a penalty. Moreover, since
all mankind was typified in the person of Christ,
the court must have been one having jurisdiction
over all mankind ; and since he was delivered
to Pilate, an officer of Tiberius, it must follow
that the jurisdiction of Tiberius was universal.
He draws an argument also from the wager of
battle to prove that the Roman Empire was
divinely permitted, at least, if not instituted.
For since it is admitted that God gives the
victory, and since the Romans always won it,
therefore it was God's will that the Romans
should attain universal empire. In the third
book he endeavors to prove that the emperor
holds by divine right, and not by permission of
the pope. He assigns supremacy to the pope
in spirituals, and to the emperor in temporals.
This was a delicate subject, and though the
king of Saxony (a Catholic) says that Dante did
not overstep the limits of orthodoxy, it was on
account of this part of the book that it was
condemned as heretical.1

Next follows the treatise " De Vulgari Elo-
quio." Though we have doubts whether we
possess this book as Dante wrote it, inclining
rather to think that it is a copy in some parts

1 It is instructive to compare Dante's political treatise with
those of Aristotle and Spinoza. We thus see more clearly the
limitations of the age in which he lived, and this may help us
to a broader view of him as poet.

44 DANTE

textually exact, in others an abstract, there can
be no question either of its great glossological
value or that it conveys the opinions of Dante.
We put it next in order, though written later
than the " Convito," only because, like the " De
Monarchia," it is written in Latin. It is a proof
of the national instinct of Dante, and of his con
fidence in his genius, that he should have chosen
to write all his greatest works in what was deemed
by scholars a. patois, but which he more than any
other man made a classic language. Had he in
tended the "De Monarchia" for a political pam
phlet, he would certainly not have composed it
in the dialect of the few. The " De Vulgari
Eloquio " was to have been in four books.
Whether it was ever finished or not it is im
possible to say ; but only two books have come
down to us. It treats of poetizing in the vulgar
tongue, and of the different dialects of Italy.
From the particularity with which it treats of the
dialect of Bologna, it has been supposed to have
been written in that city, or at least to furnish
an argument in favor of Dante's having at some
time studied there. In lib. n. cap. ii. is a re
markable passage in which, defining the various
subjects of song and what had been treated in
the vulgar tongue by different poets, he says
that his own theme had been righteousness.

The " Convito " is also imperfect. It was to
have consisted of fourteen treatises, but, as we

DANTE 45

have it, contains only four. In the first he justifies
the use of the vulgar idiom in preference to the
Latin. In the other three he comments on three
of his own "Canzoni." It will be impossible to
give an adequate analysis of this work in the
limits allowed us.1 It is an epitome of the learn
ing of that age, philosophical, theological, and
scientific. As affording illustration of the " Corn-
media," and of Dante's style of thought, it
is invaluable. It is reckoned by his country
men the first piece of Italian prose, and there
are parts of it which still stand unmatched for
eloquence and pathos. The Italians (even such
a man as Cantu among the rest) find in it and a
few passages of the " Commedia" the proof that
Dante, as a natural philosopher, was wholly in
advance of his age, — that he had, among other
things, anticipated Newton in the theory of grav
itation. But this is as idle as the claim that
Shakespeare had discovered the circulation of
the blood before Harvey,2 and one might as
well attempt to dethrone Newton because Chau
cer speaks of the love which draws the apple to
the earth. The truth is, that it was only as a
poet that Dante was great and original (glory
enough, surely, to have not more than two com
petitors), and in matters of science, as did all

1 A very good one may be found in the sixth volume of the
Molini edition of Dante, pp. 391-433.

2 See Field's Theory of Colors.

46 DANTE

his contemporaries, sought the guiding hand of
Aristotle like a child. Dante is assumed by
many to have been a Platonist, but this is not
true, in the strict sense of the word. Like all
men of great imagination, he was an idealist, and
so far a Platonist, as Shakespeare might be
proved to have been by his sonnets. But Dante's
direct acquaintance with Plato may be reckoned
at zero, and we consider it as having strongly
influenced his artistic development for the better,
that, transcendentalist as he was by nature, so
much so as to be in danger of lapsing into an
Oriental mysticism, his habits of thought should
have been made precise and his genius disciplined
by a mind so severely logical as that of Aristotle.
This does not conflict with what we believe to
be equally true, that the Platonizing commen
taries on his poem, like that of Landino, are
the most satisfactory. Beside the prose already
mentioned, we have a small collection of Dante's
letters, the recovery of the larger number of
which we owe to Professor Witte. They are all
interesting, some of them especially so, as illus
trating the prophetic character with which Dante
invested himself. The longest is one addressed
to Can Grande della Scala, explaining the inten
tion of the " Commedia " and the method to be
employed in its interpretation. The authenticity
of this letter has been doubted, but is now gen
erally admitted.

DANTE 47

We shall barely allude to the minor poems,
full of grace and depth of mystic sentiment, and
which would have given Dante a high place in
the history of Italian literature, even had he
written nothing else. They are so abstract, how
ever, that without the extrinsic interest of hav
ing been written by the author of the " Corn-
media," they would probably find few readers.
All that is certainly known in regard to the
" Commedia " is that it was composed during
the nineteen years which intervened between
Dante's banishment and death. Attempts have
been made to fix precisely the dates of the dif
ferent parts, but without success, and the differ
ences of opinion are bewildering. Foscolo has
constructed an ingenious and forcible argument
to show that no part of the poem was published
before the author's death. The question de
pends somewhat on the meaning we attach to
the word " published." In an age of manuscript
the wide dispersion of a poem so long even as
a single one of the three divisions of the " Com
media " would be accomplished very slowly.
But it is difficult to account for the great fame
which Dante enjoyed during the latter years of
his life, unless we suppose that parts, at least,
of his greatest work had been read or heard by
a large number of persons. This need not, how
ever, imply publication ; and Witte, whose opin
ion is entitled to great consideration, supposes

48 DANTE

even the " Inferno " not to have been finished
before 1314 or 1315. In a matter where cer
tainty would be impossible, it is of little conse
quence to reproduce conjectural dates. In the
letter to Can Grande, before alluded to, Dante
himself has stated the theme of his song. He
says that " the literal subject of the whole work
is the state of the soul after death simply con
sidered. But if the work be taken allegorically,
the subject is man, as by merit or demerit,
through freedom of the will, he renders him
self liable to the reward or punishment of
justice." He tells us that the work is to be
interpreted in a literal, allegorical, moral, and
anagogical sense, a mode then commonly em
ployed with the Scriptures,1 and of which he
gives the following example : — " To make
which mode of treatment more clear, it may
be applied in the following verses : In exitu
Israel de Aegypto, domus Jacob de populo barbaro^
fact a est Judaea sanctificatio ejus, Israel po test as
ejus.2 For if we look only at the literal sense,
it signifies the going out of the children of Israel
from Egypt in the time of Moses ; if at the
allegorical, it signifies our redemption through
Christ ; if at the moral, it signifies the conver
sion of the soul from the grief and misery of sin
to a state of grace ; and if at the anagogical, it

1 As by Dante himself in the Convito.

2 Psalm cxiv. 1,2.

DANTE 49

signifies the passage of the blessed soul from the
bondage of this corruption to the freedom of
eternal glory." A Latin couplet, cited by one
of the old commentators, puts the matter com
pactly together for us : —

" Lit era gesta refert; quid credas allegoria ;
Mora Us quid agas; quid speres anagogia."

Dante tells us that he calls his poem a comedy
because it has a fortunate ending, and gives its
title thus : " Here begins the comedy of Dante
Alighieri, a Florentine by birth, but not in
morals." ' The poem consists of three parts,
" Hell," " Purgatory/' and " Paradise." Each
part is divided into thirty-three cantos, in allu
sion to the years of the Saviour's life ; for
though the " Hell " contains thirty-four, the first
canto is merely introductory. In the form of
the verse (triple rhyme) we may find an emblem
of the Trinity, and in the three divisions, of the
threefold state of man, sin, grace, and beatitude.
Symbolic meanings reveal themselves, or make
themselves suspected, everywhere, as in the
architecture of the Middle Ages. An analysis
of the poem would be out of place here, but we
must say a few words of Dante's position as re
spects modern literature. If we except Wolfram
von Eschenbach, he is the first Christian poet,

1 He commonly prefaced his letters with some such phrase
as exul immeritus.

50 DANTE

the first (indeed, we might say the only) one
whose whole system of thought is colored in
every finest fibre by a purely Christian theology.
Lapse through sin, mediation, and redemption,
these are the subjects of the three parts of the
poem : or, otherwise stated, intellectual convic
tion of the result of sin, typified in Virgil (sym
bol also of that imperialism whose origin he
sang) ; moral conversion after repentance, by
divine grace, typified in Beatrice ; reconciliation
with God, and actual blinding vision of him —
"The pure in heart shall see God." Here are
general truths which any Christian may accept
and find comfort in. But the poem comes nearer
to us than this. It is the real history of a brother
man, of a tempted, purified, and at last triumph
ant human soul ; it teaches the benign ministry
of sorrow, and that the ladder of that faith by
which man climbs to the actual fruition of things
not seen ex quovis ligno non fit, but only of the
cross manfully borne. The poem is also, in a
very intimate sense, an apotheosis of woman.
Indeed, as Marvell's drop of dew mirrored the
whole firmament, so we find in the " Corn-
media " the image of the Middle Ages ; and the
sentimental gyniolatry of chivalry, which was at
best but skin-deep, is lifted in Beatrice to an
ideal and universal plane. It is the same with
Catholicism, with imperialism, with the scholas
tic philosophy ; and nothing is more wonderful

DANTE 51

than the power of absorption and assimilation in
this man, who could take up into himself the
world that then was, and reproduce it with such
cosmopolitan truth to human nature and to his
own individuality, as to reduce all contemporary
history to a mere comment on his vision. We
protest, therefore, against the parochial criti
cism which would degrade Dante to a mere par
tisan, which sees in him a Luther before his
time, and would clap the bonnet rouge upon his
heavenly muse.

Like all great artistic minds, Dante was es
sentially conservative, and, arriving precisely in
that period of transition when Church and Em
pire were entering upon the modern epoch of
thought, he strove to preserve both by present
ing the theory of both in a pristine and ideal
perfection. The whole nature of Dante was one
of intense belief. There is proof upon proof
that he believed himself invested with a divine
mission. Like the Hebrew prophets, with whose
writings his whole soul was imbued, it was back
to the old worship and the God of the fathers
that he called his people ; and not Isaiah him
self was more destitute of that humor, that sense
of ludicrous contrast, which is an essential in the
composition of a sceptic. In Dante's time, learn
ing had something of a sacred character ; the line
was hardly yet drawn between the clerk and the
possessor of supernatural powers ; it was with

52 DANTE

the next generation, with the elegant Petrarch,
even more truly than with the kindly Boccaccio,
that the purely literary life, and that dilettant
ism, which is the twin sister of scepticism, be
gan. As a merely literary figure, the position
of Dante is remarkable. Not only as respects
thought, but as respects aesthetics also, his great
poem stands as a monument on the boundary
line between the ancient and modern. He not
only marks, but is in himself, the transition.
Arma virumque cano, that is the motto of classic
song ; the things of this world and great men.
Dante says, subjectum est homo, not <vir ; my
theme is man, not a man. The scene of the old
epic and drama was in this world, and its catas
trophe here ; Dante lays his scene in the human
soul, and his fifth act in the other world. He
makes himself the protagonist of his own drama.
In the "Commedia" for the first time Chris
tianity wholly revolutionizes Art, and becomes
its seminal principle. But aesthetically also, as
well as morally, Dante stands between the old
and the new, and reconciles them. The theme
of his poem is purely subjective, modern, what
is called romantic; but its treatment is object
ive (almost to realism, here and there), and it
is limited by a form of classic severity. In the
same way he sums up in himself the two schools
of modern poetry which had preceded him, and,
while essentially lyrical in his subject, is epic in

DANTE 53

the handling of it. So also he combines the
deeper and more abstract religious sentiment of
the Teutonic races with the scientific precision
and absolute systematism of the Romanic. In
one respect Dante stands alone. While we can
in some sort account for such representative
men as Voltaire and Goethe (nay, even Shake
speare) by the intellectual and moral fermenta
tion of the age in which they lived, Dante seems
morally isolated and to have drawn his inspira
tion almost wholly from his own internal re
serves. Of his mastery in style we need say
little here. Of his mere language, nothing could
be better than the expression of Rivarol : "His
verse holds itself erect by the mere force of the
substantive and verb, without the help of a sin
gle epithet." We will only add a word on what
seems to us an extraordinary misapprehension
of Coleridge, who disparages Dante by compar
ing his Lucifer with Milton's Satan. He seems
to have forgotten that the precise measurements
of Dante were not prosaic, but absolutely de
manded by the nature of his poem. He is de
scribing an actual journey, and his exactness
makes a part of the verisimilitude. We read
the " Paradise Lost " as a poem, the " Corn-
media " as a record of fact ; and no one can read
Dante without believing his story, for it is plain
that he believed it himself. It is false aesthetics
to confound the grandiose with the imaginative.

54 DANTE

Milton's angels are not to be compared with
Dante's, at once real and supernatural ; and the
Deity of Milton is a Calvinistic Zeus, while
nothing in all poetry approaches the imagina
tive grandeur of Dante's vision of God at the
conclusion of the "Paradiso." In all literary
history there is no such figure as Dante, no
such homogeneousness of life and works, such
loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of
the unessential ; and there is no moral more
touching than that the contemporary recognition
of such a nature, so endowed and so faithful to
its endowment, should be summed up in the
sentence of Florence : Igne comburatur sic quod
moriaturS

The range of Dante's influence is not less
remarkable than its intensity. Minds, the anti
podes of each other in temper and endowment,
alike feel the force of his attraction, the perva-

1 In order to fix more precisely in the mind the place of
Dante in relation to the history of thought, literature, and
events, we subjoin a few dates: Dante born, 1265; end of
Crusades, death of St. Louis, 1270; Aquinas died, 1274;
Bonaventura died, 1274; Giotto born, 1276; Albertus
Magnus died, 1280; Sicilian Vespers, 1282; death of
Ugolino and Francesca da Rimini, 1282; death of Beatrice,
1290; Roger Bacon died, 1292; death of Cimabue, 1302;
Dante's banishment, 1302; Petrarch born, 1304; Fra Dol-
cino burned, 1307; Pope Clement V. at Avignon, 1309;
Templars suppressed, 1312; Boccaccio born, 1313; Dante
died, 1321; Wycliffe born, 1324; Chaucer born, 1328.

DANTE 55

sive comfort of his light and warmth. Boccaccio
and Lamennais are touched with the same re
verential enthusiasm. The imaginative Ruskin
is rapt by him, as we have seen, perhaps beyond
the limit where critical appreciation merges in
enthusiasm ; and the matter-of-fact Schlosser
tells us that "he, who was wont to contemplate
earthly life wholly in an earthly light, has made
use of Dante, Landino, and Vellutello in his
solitude to bring a heavenly light into his inward
life." Almost all other poets have their seasons,
but Dante penetrates to the moral core of those
who once fairly come within his sphere, and pos
sesses them wholly. His readers turn students,
his students zealots, and what was a taste becomes
a religion. The homeless exile finds a home in
thousands of grateful hearts : E da esilio venne a
quest a pace.

Every kind of objection, aesthetic and other,
may be, and has been, made to the " Divina
Commedia," especially by critics who have but
a superficial acquaintance with it, or rather with
the " Inferno," which is as far as most English
critics go. Coleridge himself, who had a way of
divining what was in books, may be justly sus
pected of not going further, though with Gary
to help him. Mr. Carlyle, who has said admir
able things of Dante the man, was very imper
fectly read in Dante the author, or he would
never have put Sordello in hell and the meeting

56 DANTE

with Beatrice in paradise. In France it was not
much better (though Rivarol has said the best
thing hitherto of Dante's parsimony of epithet ')
before Ozanam, who, if with decided ultramon
tane leanings, has written excellently well of our
poet, and after careful study. Voltaire, though
not without relentings toward a poet who had
put popes heels upward in hell, regards him on
the whole as a stupid monster and barbarian. It
was no better in Italy, if we may trust Foscolo,
who affirms that " neither Pelli nor others de
servedly more celebrated than he ever read at
tentively the poem of Dante, perhaps never ran
through it from the first verse to the last." 2
Accordingly we have heard that the " Comme-
dia " was a sermon, a political pamphlet, the re
vengeful satire of a disappointed Ghibelline, nay,
worse, of a turncoat Guelph. It is narrow, it is
bigoted, it is savage, it is theological, it is medi
aeval, it is heretical, it is scholastic, it is obscure,
it is pedantic, its Italian is not that of la Crusca,

1 Rivarol characterized only a single quality of Dante's
style, who knew how to spend as well as spare. Even the
Inferno, on which he based his remark, might have put him
on his guard. Dante understood very well the use of orna
ment in its fitting place. Est enim exornatio alicujus conve-
nientis additio, he tells us in his De Vulgari Eloquio (lib. n.
cap. i.). His simile of the doves {Inferno, v. 82 et seq. ),
perhaps the most exquisite in all poetry, quite oversteps Riva
rol' s narrow limit of " substantive and verb."

2 Discorso sul testOy ec., section xviii.

DANTE 57

its ideas are not those of an enlightened eight
eenth century, it is everything, in short, that a
poem should not be ; and yet, singularly enough,
the circle of its charm has widened in proportion
as men have receded from the theories of Church
and State which are supposed to be its founda
tion, and as the modes of thought of its author
have become more alien to those of his readers.
In spite of all objections, some of which are well
founded, the " Commedia" remains one of the
three or four universal books that have ever been
written.

We may admit, with proper limitations, the
modern distinction between the Artist and the
Moralist. With the one Form is all in all, with
the other Tendency. The aim of the one is to
delight, of the other to convince. The one is
master of his purpose, the other mastered by it.
The whole range of perception and thought is
valuable to the one as it will minister to imag
ination, to the other only as it is available for
argument. With the moralist use is beauty, good
only as it serves ah ulterior purpose ; with the
artist beauty is use, good in and for itself. In
the fine arts the vehicle makes part of the thought,
coalesces with it. The living conception shapes
itself a body in marble, color, or modulated
sound, and henceforth the two are inseparable.
The results of the moralist pass into the intel
lectual atmosphere of mankind, it matters little

58 DANTE

by what mode of conveyance. But where, as in
Dante, the religious sentiment and the imagina
tion are both organic, something interfused with
the whole being of the man, so that they work
in kindly sympathy, the moral will insensibly
suffuse itself with beauty as a cloud with light.
Then that fine sense of remote analogies, awake
to the assonance between facts seemingly remote
and unrelated, between the outward and inward
worlds, though convinced that the things of this
life are shadows, will be persuaded also that they
are not fantastic merely, but imply a substance
somewhere, and will love to set forth the beauty
of the visible image because it suggests the in
effably higher charm of the unseen original.
Dante's ideal of life, the enlightening and
strengthening of that native instinct of the soul
which leads it to strive backward toward its
divine source, may sublimate the senses till each
becomes a window for the light of truth and the
splendor of God to shine through. In him as
in Calderon the perpetual presence of imagina
tion not only glorifies the philosophy of life and
the science of theology, but idealizes both in
symbols of material beauty. Though Dante's
conception of the highest end of man was that
he should climb through every phase of human
experience to that transcendental and supersen-
sual region where the true, the good, and the
beautiful blend in the white light of God, yet

DANTE 59

the prism of his imagination forever resolved the
ray into color again, and he loved to show it also
where, entangled and obstructed in matter, it
became beautiful once more to the eye of sense.
Speculation, he tells us, is the use, without any
mixture, of our noblest part (the reason). And
this part cannot in this life have its perfect use,
which is to behold God (who is the highest ob
ject of the intellect), except inasmuch as the in
tellect considers and beholds him in his effects.1
Underlying Dante the metaphysician, states
man, and theologian, was always Dante the poet,2
irradiating and vivifying, gleaming through in a
picturesque phrase, or touching things unex
pectedly with that ideal light which softens and
subdues like distance in the landscape. The
stern outline of his system wavers and melts
away before the eye of the reader in a mirage of

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. xxii.

a It is remarkable that when Dante, in 1297, as a prelim
inary condition to active politics, enrolled himself in the guild
of physicians and apothecaries, he is qualified only with the
title poet a. The arms of the Alighieri (curiously suitable to
him who sovra gli altri come aquila vola^) were a wing of
gold in a field of azure. His vivid sense of beauty even hovers
sometimes like a corposant over the somewhat stiff lines of his
Latin prose. For example, in his letter to the kings and princes
of Italy on the coming of Henry VII. : " A new day bright
ens, revealing the dawn which already scatters the shades of
long calamity; already the breezes of morning gather; the lips
of heaven are reddening ! ' '

60 DANTE

imagination that lifts from beyond the sphere of
vision and hangs in serener air images of infinite
suggestion projected from worlds not realized,
but substantial to faith, hope, and aspiration.
Beyond the horizon of speculation floats, in
the passionless splendor of the empyrean, the
city of our God, the Rome whereof Christ is a
Roman,1 the citadel of refuge, even in this life,
for souls purified by sorrow and self-denial,
transhumanized 2 to the divine abstraction of
pure contemplation. "And it is called Empy
rean," he says in his letter to Can Grande,
" which is the same as a heaven blazing with fire
or ardor, not because there is in it a material fire
or burning, but a spiritual one, which is blessed
love or charity." But this splendor he bodies
forth, if sometimes quaintly, yet always vividly
and most often in types of winning grace.

Dante was a mystic with a very practical turn
of mind. A Platonist by nature, an Aristote
lian by training, his feet keep closely to the
narrow path of dialectics, because he believed
it the safest, while his eyes are fixed on the
stars and his brain is busy with things not de
monstrable, save by that grace of God which
passeth all understanding, nor capable of being
told unless by far-off hints and adumbrations.
Though he himself has directly explained the

1 Purgatorio, xxxn. loo.

2 Paradiso, i. 70.

DANTE 6 1

scope, the method, and the larger meaning of
his greatest work,1 though he has indirectly
pointed out the way to its interpretation in the
" Convito," and though everything he wrote
is but an explanatory comment on his own char
acter and opinions, unmistakably clear and pre
cise, yet both man and poem continue not only
to be misunderstood popularly, but also by
such as should know better.2 That those who
confined their studies to the " Commedia "
should have interpreted it variously is not won
derful, for out of the first or literal meaning
others open, one out of another, each of wider
circuit and purer abstraction, like Dante's own
heavens, giving and receiving light.3 Indeed,
Dante himself is partly to blame for this. " The
form or mode of treatment," he says, " is poetic,
fictive, descriptive, digressive, transumptive, and
withal definitive, divisive, probative, impro-
bative, and positive of examples." Here are
conundrums enough, to be sure ! To Italians
at home, for whom the great arenas of political

1 In a letter to Can Grande (xi. of the Epistolae}.

2 Witte, Wegele, and Ruth in German, and Ozanam in
French, have rendered ignorance of Dante inexcusable among
men of culture.

3 Inferno, vn. 75. " Nay, his style," says Miss Rossetti,
"is more than concise: it is elliptical, it is recondite. A first
thought often lies coiled up and hidden under a second; the
words which state the conclusion involve the premises and
develop the subject." (p. 3.)

62 DANTE

and religious speculation were closed, the temp
tation to find a subtler meaning than the real
one was irresistible. Italians in exile, on the
other hand, made Dante the stalking-horse from
behind which they could take a long shot at
Church and State, or at obscurer foes.1 In
finitely touching and sacred to us is the instinct
of intense sympathy which draws these latter
toward their great forerunner, exul immeritus
like themselves.2 But they have too often
wrung a meaning from Dante which is injurious
to the man and out of keeping with the ideas of

1 A complete vocabulary of Italian billingsgate might be
selected from Biagioli. Or see the concluding pages of Nan-
nucci's excellent tract, Intorno alle voci usate da Dante,
Corfu, 1 840. Even Foscolo could not always refrain. Dante
should have taught them to shun such vulgarities. See In
ferno , XXX. I3I-I48.

2 " My Italy, my sweetest Italy, for having loved thee
too much I have lost thee, and, perhaps, ... ah, may God
avert the omen! But more proud than sorrowful for an evil
endured for thee alone, I continue to consecrate my vigils
to thee alone. . . . An exile full of anguish, perchance,
availed to sublime the more in thy Alighieri that lofty soul
which was a beautiful gift of thy smiling sky; and an exile
equally wearisome and undeserved now avails, perhaps, to
sharpen my small genius so that it may penetrate into
what he left written for thy instruction and for his glory."
(Rossetti, Disamina, ec., p. 405.) Rossetti is himself a
proof that a noble mind need not be narrowed by misfortune.
His Comment (unhappily incomplete) is one of the most val
uable and suggestive.

DANTE 63

his age. The aim in expounding a great poem
should be, not to discover an endless variety
of meanings often contradictory, but whatever
it has of great and perennial significance ; for such
it must have, or it would long ago have ceased
to be living and operative, would long ago have
taken refuge in the Chartreuse of great libraries,
dumb thenceforth to all mankind. We do not
mean to say that this minute exegesis is use
less or unpraiseworthy, but only that it should
be subsidiary to the larger way. It serves to
bring out more clearly what is very wonderful in
Dante, namely, the omnipresence of his memory
throughout the work, so that its intimate coher
ence does not exist in spite of the reconditeness
and complexity of allusion, but is woven out of
them. The poem has many senses, he tells us,
and there can be no doubt of it ; but it has also,
and this alone will account for its fascination, a
living soul behind them all and informing all,
an intense singleness of purpose, a core of
doctrine simple, human, and wholesome, though
it be also, to use his own phrase, the bread of
angels.

Nor is this unity characteristic only of the
" Divina Commedia." All the works of Dante,
with the possible exception of the " De Vulgari
Eloquio " (which is unfinished), are component
parts of a Whole Duty of Man mutually com
pleting and interpreting one another. They are

64 DANTE

also, as truly as Wordsworth's " Prelude/1 a
history of the growth of a poet's mind. Like
the English poet he valued himself at a high
rate, the higher no doubt after Fortune had made
him outwardly cheap. Sempre il magnanimo si
magnifica in suo cuore ; e cost lo pusillanimo per
contrario sempre si tiene meno che non 2.1 As in
the prose of Milton, whose striking likeness to
Dante in certain prominent features of character
has been remarked by Foscolo, there are in
Dante's minor works continual allusions to him
self of great value as material for his biographer.
Those who read attentively will discover that the
tenderness he shows toward Francesca and her
lover did not spring from any friendship for her
family, -but was a constant quality of his nature,
and that what is called his revengeful ferocity is
truly the implacable resentment of a lofty mind
and a lover of good against evil, whether show
ing itself in private or public life; perhaps hating
the former manifestation of it the most because
he believed it to be the root of the latter, — a
faith which those who have watched the course
of politics in a democracy, as he had, will be
inclined to share. His gentleness is all the more
striking by contrast, like that silken compensa
tion which blooms out of the thorny stem of

1 The great-minded man ever magnifies himself in his heart,
and in like manner the pusillanimous holds himself less than he
is. {ConvitOy tratt. i. c. n.)

DANTE 65

the cactus. His moroseness,1 his party spirit,
and his personal vindictiveness are all predicated
upon the " Inferno/' and upon a misapprehen
sion or careless reading even of that. Dante's
zeal was not of that sentimental kind, quickly
kindled and as soon quenched, that hovers on
the surface of shallow minds, —

" Even as the flame of unctuous things is wont
To move upon the outer surface only "; 2

it was the steady heat of an inward fire kindling
the whole character of the man through and
through, like the minarets of his own city of
Dis.3 He was, as seems distinctive in some
degree of the Latinized races, an unflinching
a priori logician, not unwilling to " syllogize
invidious verities," 4 wherever they might lead
him, like Sigier, whom he has put in paradise,
though more than suspected of heterodoxy. But
at the same time, as we shall see, he had some
thing of the practical good sense of that Teutonic

1 Dante's notion of virtue was not that of an ascetic, nor
has any one ever painted her in colors more soft and splendid
than he in the Convito. She is " sweeter than the lids of
Juno's eyes," and he dwells on the delights of her love with
a rapture which kindles and purifies. So far from making her
an inquisitor, he says expressly that she " should be gladsome
and not sullen in all her works." {Convito, tratt. i. c. 8.)
' « Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose ' ' !

* Inferno > xix. 28, 29.

3 Ibid. vm. 70-75.

4 Paradiso, x. 138.

v

66 DANTE

stock whence he drew a part of his blood,
which prefers a malleable syllogism that can yield
without breaking, to the inevitable but incal
culable pressure of human nature and the stiffer
logic of events. His theory of Church and State
was not merely a fantastic one, but intended for
the use and benefit of men as they were ; and
he allowed accordingly for aberrations, to which
even the law of gravitation is forced to give place ;
how much more, then, any scheme whose very
starting-point is the freedom of the will !

We are thankful for a commentator at last
who passes dry-shod over the turbide onde of
inappreciative criticism, and, quietly waving aside
the thick atmosphere which has gathered about
the character of Dante both as man and poet,
opens for us his City of Doom with the divining-
rod of reverential study. Miss Rossetti comes
commended to our interest, not only as one of
a family which seems to hold genius by the
tenure of gavelkind, but as having a special claim
by inheritance to a love and understanding of
Dante. She writes English with a purity that
has in it something of feminine softness with no
lack of vigor or precision. Her lithe mind winds
itself with surprising grace through the meta
physical and other intricacies of her subject. She
brings to her work the refined enthusiasm of a
cultivated woman and the penetration of sym
pathy. She has chosen the better way (in which

DANTE 67

Germany took the lead) of interpreting Dante
out of himself, the pure spring from which, and
from which alone, he drew his inspiration, and
not from muddy Fra Alberico or Abbate Giovac-
chino, from stupid visions of St. Paul or voy
ages of St. Brandan. She has written by far
the best comment that has appeared in English,
and we should say the best that has been done
in England, were it not for her father's " Co-
mento Analitico," for excepting which her filial
piety will thank us. Students of Dante in the
original will be grateful to her for many suggest
ive hints, and those who read him in English
will find in her volume a travelling-map in which
the principal points and their connections are
clearly set down. In what we shall say of Dante
we shall endeavor only to supplement her in
terpretation with such side-lights as may have
been furnished us by twenty years of assiduous
study. Dante's thought is multiform, and, like
certain street-signs, once common, presents a
different image according to the point of view.
Let us consider briefly what was the plan of
the " Divina Commedia " and Dante's aim in
writing it, which, if not to justify, was at least
to illustrate, for warning and example, the ways
of God to man. The higher intention of the
poem was to set forth the results of sin, or un
wisdom, and of virtue, or wisdom, in this life,
and consequently in the life to come, which is

68 DANTE

but the continuation and fulfilment of this. The
scene accordingly is the spiritual world, of which
we are as truly denizens now as hereafter. The
poem is a diary of the human soul in its journey
upwards from error through repentance to atone
ment with God. To make it apprehensible by
those whom it was meant to teach, nay, from its
very nature as a poem, and not a treatise of
abstract morality, it must set forth everything
by means of sensible types and images.

" To speak thus is adapted to your mind,

Since only through the sense it apprehendeth
What then it worthy makes of intellect.
On this account the Scripture condescends
Unto your faculties, and feet and hands
To God attributes, and means something else." x

Whoever has studied mediaeval art in any of
its branches need not be told that Dante's age
was one that demanded very palpable and even
revolting types. As in the old legend, a drop of
scalding sweat from the damned soul must shrivel
the very skin of those for whom he wrote, to
make them wince if not to turn them away from
evil-doing. To consider his hell a place of phys
ical torture is to take Circe's herd for real swine.
Its mouth yawns not only under Florence, but
before the feet of every man everywhere who
goeth about to do evil. His hell is a condition
of the soul, and he could not find images loath-
1 Paradiso, iv. 40—45 (Longfellow's version).

DANTE 69

some enough to express the moral deformity
which is wrought by sin on its victims, or his
own abhorrence of it. Its inmates meet you in
the street every day.

" Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed
In one self place; for where we are is hell,
And where hell is there we must ever be." *

It is our own sensual eye that gives evil the
appearance of good, and out of a crooked hag
makes a bewitching siren. The reason enlight
ened by the grace of God sees it as it truly is,
full of stench and corruption.2 It is this office of
reason which Dante undertakes to perform, by
divine commission, in the " Inferno." There
can be no doubt that he looked upon himself
as invested with the prophetic function, and the
Hebrew forerunners, in whose society his soul
sought consolation and sustainment, certainly set
him no example of observing the conventions
of good society in dealing with the enemies
of God. Indeed, his notions of good society
were not altogether those of this world in any
generation. He would have defined it as mean
ing "the peers " of Philosophy, "souls free from
wretched and vile delights and from vulgar

1 Marlowe's Faustus. " Which way I fly is hell; myself
am hell." (Paradise Lost, iv. 75.) In the same way, ogni
dove in cielo e Paradiso. (Paradiso, in. 88, 89.)

2 Purgatorhy xix. 7-33.

70 DANTE

habits, endowed with genius and memory/* l
Dante himself had precisely this endowment,
and in a very surprising degree. His genius
enabled him to see and to show what he saw to
others ; his memory neither forgot nor forgave.
Very hateful to his fervid heart and sincere mind
would have been the modern theory which deals
with sin as involuntary error, and by shifting off
the fault to the shoulders of Atavism or those
of Society, personified for purposes of excuse,
but escaping into impersonality again from the
grasp of retribution, weakens that sense of per
sonal responsibility which is the root of self-
respect and the safeguard of character. Dante
indeed saw clearly enough that the Divine justice
did at length overtake Society in the ruin of
states caused by the corruption of private, and
thence of civic, morals ; but a personality so
intense as his could not be satisfied with such
a tardy and generalized penalty as this. " It is
Thou," he says sternly, "who hast done this
thing, and Thou, not Society, shalt be damned
for it ; nay, damned all the worse for this paltry
subterfuge. This is not my judgment, but that
of universal Nature 2 from before the beginning
of the world/' 3 Accordingly the highest rea
son, typified in his guide Virgil, rebukes him

1 ConvitOy tratt. n. c. 16.

2 La natura universal, doe Iddio. (Ibid. , tratt. in. c. 4. )

3 Inferno , m. 7, 8.

DANTE 71

for bringing compassion to the judgments of
God/ and again embraces him and calls the
mother that bore him blessed, when he bids
Filippo Argenti begone among the other dogs.2
This latter case shocks our modern feelings the
more rudely for the simple pathos with which
Dante makes Argenti answer when asked who
he was, " Thou seest I am one that weeps." It
is also the one that makes most strongly for the
theory of Dante's personal vindictiveness,3 and
it may count for what it is worth. We are not

1 Inferno, xx. 30. Mr. W. M. Rossetti strangely enough
renders this verse " Who hath a passion for God's judge-
ship." Compassion portay is the reading of the best texts, and
Witte adopts it. Bud's comment is " doe porta pena e dolor e
di colui che giustamente e condannato da Dio che e sempre
giusto" There is an analogous passage in The Revelation
of the Apostle Paul, printed in the Proceedings of the American
Oriental Society (vol. viii. pp. 213, 214): "And the angel
answered and said, « Wherefore dost thou weep ? Why ! art
thou more merciful than God ? ' And I said, ' God forbid, O
my lord; for God is good and long-suffering unto the sons
of men, and he leaves every one of them to his own will, and
he walks as he pleases.' ' This is precisely Dante's view.

2 Ibid. viii. 40.

3 "I following her (Moral Philosophy) in the work as
well as the passion, so far as I could, abominated and dis
paraged the errors of men, not to the infamy and shame of
the erring, but of the errors." {Convito, tratt. iv. c. I.)
" Wherefore in my judgment as he who defames a worthy
man ought to be avoided by people and not listened to, so a
vile man descended of worthy ancestors ought to be hunted
out by all." (Ibid, tratt. iv. c. 29.)

72 DANTE

greatly concerned to defend him on that score,
for he believed in the righteous use of anger,
and that baseness was its legitimate quarry. He
did not think the Tweeds and Fisks, the polit
ical wire-pullers and convention-packers, of his
day merely amusing, and he certainly did think
it the duty of an upright and thoroughly trained
citizen to speak out severely and unmistakably.
He believed firmly, almost fiercely, in a divine
order of the universe, a conception whereof had
been vouchsafed him, and that whatever and
whoever hindered or jostled it, whether wilfully
or blindly it mattered not, was to be got out of
the way at all hazards ; because obedience to
God's law, and not making things generally
comfortable, was the highest duty of man, as it
was also his only way to true felicity. It has
been commonly assumed that Dante was a man
soured by undeserved misfortune, that he took
up a wholly new outfit of political opinions with
his fallen fortunes, and that his theory of life and
of man's relations to it was altogether reshaped
for him by the bitter musings of his exile. This
would be singular, to say the least, in a man
who tells us that he " felt himself indeed four
square against the strokes of chance," and whose
convictions were so intimate that they were not
merely intellectual conclusions, but parts of his
moral being. Fortunately we are called on to
believe nothing of the kind. Dante himself has

DANTE 73

supplied us with hints and dates which enable
us to watch the germination and trace the growth
of his double theory of government, applicable
to man as he is a citizen of this world, and as
he hopes to become hereafter a freeman of the
celestial city. It would be of little consequence
to show in which of two equally selfish and
short-sighted parties a man enrolled himself
six hundred years ago, but it is worth some
thing to know that a man of ambitious temper
and violent passions, aspiring to office in a city
of factions, could rise to a level of principle so
far above them all. Dante's opinions have life
in them still, because they were drawn from liv
ing sources of reflection and experience, because
they were reasoned out from the astronomic
laws of history and ethics, and were not weather-
guesses snatched in a glance at the doubtful
political sky of the hour.

Swiftly the politic goes: is it dark ? he borrows a lantern;
Slowly the statesman and sure, guiding his feet by the stars.

It will be well, then, to clear up the chronology
of Dante's thought. When his ancestor Caccia-
guida prophesies to him the life which is to be
his after 1300,' he says, speaking of his exile : —

" And that which most shall weigh upon thy shoulders
Will be the bad and foolish company
With which into this valley thou shalt fall;

1 Paradise, xvn. 61-69.

74 DANTE

Of their bestiality their own proceedings

Shall furnish proof; so '( will be well for thee
A party to have made thee by thyself."

Here both context and grammatical construc
tion (infallible guides in a writer so scrupulous
and exact) imply irresistibly that Dante had be
come a party by himself before his exile. The
measure adopted by the priors of Florence while
he was one of them (with his assent and prob
ably by his counsel), of sending to the frontier
the leading men of both factions, confirms this
implication. Among the persons thus removed
from the opportunity of doing mischief was his
dearest friend Guido Cavalcanti, to whom he had
not long before addressed the "Vita Nuova." *
Dante evidently looked back with satisfaction
on his conduct at this time, and thought it both
honest and patriotic, as it certainly was disin
terested. " We whose country is the world, as
the ocean to the fish," he tells us, " though we
drank of the Arno in infancy, and love Florence
so much that, because we loved her, we suffer exile

1 It is worth mentioning that the sufferers in his Inferno are
in like manner pretty exactly divided between the two parties.
This is answer enough to the charge of partiality. He even
puts persons there for whom he felt affection (as Brunetto La-
tini) and respect (as Farinata degli Uberti and Frederick II.).
Till the French looked up their MSS., it was taken for granted
that the beccajo di Parigi (Purgatorio, xx. 52) was a drop
of Dante's gall. " Ce fu Huez Capez c'on apelle bouchier.' '
(Hugues Capety p. I.)

DANTE 75

unjustly, support the shoulders of our judgment
rather upon reason than the senses." ' And
again, speaking of old age, he says : " And the
noble soul at this age blesses also the times past,
and well may bless them, because, revolving
them in memory, she recalls her righteous con
duct, without which she could not enter the
port to which she draws nigh, with so much
riches and so great gain." This language is not
that of a man who regrets some former action
as mistaken, still less of one who repented it for
any disastrous consequences to himself. So, in
justifying a man for speaking of himself, he
alleges two examples, — that of Boethius, who
did so to " clear himself of the perpetual infamy
of his exile " ; and that of Augustine, " for, by
the process of his life, which was from bad to
good, from good to better, and from better to
best, he gave us example and teaching." 2 After
middle life, at least, Dante had that wisdom
" whose use brings with it marvellous beauties,
that is, contentment with every condition of
time, and contempt of those things which others
make their masters." 3 If Dante, moreover,
wrote his treatise " De Monarchia " before
1302, and we think Witte's inference4 from

1 De Vulgari Eloquio, lib. i. cap. vi. Cf. Inferno, xv.
61-64.

2 Convito, tratt. i. c. 2. 3 Ibid, tratt. HI. c. 13.

4 Opp. Min. ed. Fraticelli, ii. pp. 281 and 283. Witte

76 DANTE

its style and from the fact that he nowhere
alludes to his banishment in it, conclusive on
this point, then he was already a Ghibelline in
the same larger and unpartisan sense which
ever after distinguished him from his Italian
contemporaries.

«• Let, let the Ghibellines ply their handicraft

Beneath some other standard; for this ever
111 follows he who it and justice parts," —

he makes Justinian say, speaking of the Ro
man eagle.1 His Ghibellinism, though un
doubtedly the result of what he had seen of
Italian misgovernment, embraced in its theoret
ical application the civilized world. His political
system was one which his reason adopted, not
for any temporary expediency, but because it
conduced to justice, peace, and civilization, —
the three conditions on which alone freedom
was possible in any sense which made it worth
having. Dante was intensely Italian, nay, in
tensely Florentine, but on all great questions
he was, by the logical structure of his mind and
its philosophic impartiality, incapable of intel
lectual provincialism.2 If the circle of his affec-

is inclined to put it even earlier than 1300, and we believe he
is right.

1 Paradiso, vi. 103-105.

2 Some Florentines have amusingly enough doubted the
genuineness of the De Vulgari Eloquio, because Dante therein
denies the preeminence of the Tuscan dialect.

DANTE 77

tions, as with persistent natures commonly, was
narrow, his thought swept a broad horizon from
that tower of absolute self which he had reared
for its speculation. Even upon the principles
of poetry, mechanical and other,1 he had re
flected more profoundly than most of those who
criticise his work, and it was not by chance that
he discovered the secret of that magical word
too few, which not only distinguishes his verse
from all other, but so strikingly from his own
prose. He never took the bit of art2 between

1 See particularly the second book of the De Vulgari Elo-
quio.

2 Purgatorioy xxxm. 141. " That thing one calls beautiful
whose parts answer to each other, because pleasure results
from their harmony. " {Convitoy tratt. i. c. 5.) Carlyle says
that " he knew too, partly, that his work was great, the
greatest a man could do." He knew it fully. Telling us
how Giotto's fame as a painter had eclipsed that of Cimabue,
he takes an example from poetry also, and selecting two
Italian poets, — one the most famous of his predecessors, the
other of his contemporaries, — calmly sets himself above them
both (Purgatorio, xi. 97-99), and gives the reason for his
supremacy (Purgatorio, xxrv. 49—62). It is to be remem
bered that Amore in the latter passage does not mean love in
the ordinary sense, but in that transcendental one set forth in
the Convito, — that state of the soul wrhich opens it for the
descent of God's spirit, to make it over into his own image.
" Therefore it is manifest that in this love the Divine virtue
descends into men in the guise of an angel, . . . and it is to
be noted that the descending of the virtue of one thing into
another is nothing else than reducing it to its own likeness."
{Convito , tratt. in. c. 14.)

78 DANTE

his teeth where only poetry, and not doctrine,
was concerned.

If Dante's philosophy, on the one hand, was
practical, a guide for the conduct of life, it was,
on the other, a much more transcendent thing,
whose body was wisdom, her soul love, and her
efficient cause truth. It is a practice of wisdom
from the mere love of it, for so we must inter
pret his amoroso uso di sapienzay when we re
member how he has said before ' that " the love
of wisdom for its delight or profit is not true
love of wisdom. " And this love must embrace
knowledge in all its branches, for Dante is con
tent with nothing less than a pancratic training,
and has a scorn of dilettanti^ specialists, and
quacks. " Wherefore none ought to be called
a true philosopher who for any delight loves
any part of knowledge, as there are many who
delight in composing canzoni, and delight to
be studious in them, and who delight to be
studious in rhetoric and in music, and flee and
abandon the other sciences which are all mem
bers of wisdom." 2 " Many love better to be held
masters than to be so." With him wisdom is the
generalization from many several knowledges
of small account by themselves ; it results there
fore from breadth of culture, and would be im
possible without it. Philosophy is a noble lady

1 ConvitOy tratt. m. c. 12; ibid. c. n.

2 Ibid, tratt. in. c. 1 1 .

DANTE 79

(donna gentil '), partaking of the divine essence
by a kind of eternal marriage, while with other
intelligences she is united in a less measure " as
a mistress of whom no lover takes complete
joy." 2 The eyes of this lady are her demon
strations, and her smile is her persuasion. " The
eyes of wisdom are her demonstrations by which
truth is beheld most certainly ; and her smile
is her persuasions in which the interior light of
wisdom is shown under a certain veil, and in
these two is felt that highest pleasure of beati
tude which is the greatest good in paradise/' 3

1 ConvitOy tratt. m. Canzone y w. 1 9-22. — This lady cor
responds to Lucia {Inferno y n. 97), the prevenient Grace,
the light of God which shows the right path and guides the
feet in it. With Dante God is always the sun, " which lead-
eth others right by every road." {Infer no y I. 18.) " The
spiritual and intelligible Sun, which is God. " ( Convito, tratt.
m. c. 12.) His light " enlighteneth every man that cometh
into the world," but his dwelling is in the heavens. He who
wilfully deprives himself of this light is spiritually dead in sin.
So when in Mars he beholds the glorified spirits of the mar
tyrs he exclaims, " O Helios, who so array est them ! " {Para-
disoy xiv. 96.) Blanc {Vocabolarioy sub voce} rejects this in
terpretation. But Dante, entering the abode of the Blessed,
invokes the " good Apollo," and shortly after calls him divina
virtu. We shall have more to say of this hereafter.

a ConvitOy tratt. m. c. 12.

3 Ibid, tratt. m. c. 15. Recalling how the eyes of
Beatrice lift her servant through the heavenly spheres, and
that smile of hers so often dwelt on with rapture, we see how
Dante was in the habit of commenting and illustrating his own

8o DANTE

" It is to be known that the beholding this lady
was so largely ordained for us, not merely to
look upon the face which she shows us, but that
we may desire to attain the things which she
keeps concealed. And as through her much
thereof is seen by reason, so by her we believe
that every miracle may have its reason in
a higher intellect, and consequently may be.
Whence our good faith has its origin, whence
comes the hope of those unseen things which
we desire, and through that the operation of
charity, by the which three virtues we rise to
philosophize in that celestial Athens where the
Stoics, Peripatetics, and Epicureans through the
art of eternal truth accordingly concur in one
will." *

As to the double scope of Dante's philosophy
we will cite a passage from the " Convito," all
the more to our purpose as it will illustrate his
own method of allegorizing. " Verily the use
of our mind is double, that is, practical and

works. We must remember always that with him the alle
gorical exposition is the true one (Conv ito, tratt. iv. c. i),
the allegory being a truth which is hidden under a beautiful
falsehood (ibid, tratt. n. c. i), and that Dante thought his
poems without this exposition "under some shade of obscurity,
so that to many their beauty was more grateful than their
goodness" (ibid, tratt. i. c. i), "because the goodness is in
the meaning, and the beauty in the ornament of the words ' '
(ibid, tratt. n. c. 12).
1 Ibid, tratt. m. c. 14.

DANTE 8 1

speculative., the one and the other most delight
ful, although that of contemplation be the more
so. That of the practical is for us to act virtu
ously, that is, honorably, with prudence, temper
ance, fortitude, and justice. [These are the four
stars seen by Dante, " Purgatorio," i. 22, 27.]
That of the speculative is not to act for our
selves, but to consider the works of God and
Nature. . . . Verily of these uses one is more
full of beatitude than the other, as it is the specu
lative, which without any admixture is the use
of our noblest part. . . . And this part in this
life cannot have its use perfectly, which is to see
God, except inasmuch as the intellect considers
him and beholds him through his effects. And
that we should seek this beatitude as the highest,
and not the other, the Gospel of Mark teaches
us if we will look well. Mark says that Mary
Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and
Mary Salome went to find the Saviour at the
tomb and found him not, but found a youth
clad in white who said to them, ' Ye seek the
Saviour, and I say unto you that he is not here ;
and yet fear ye not, but go and say unto his dis
ciples and Peter that he will go before them into
Galilee, and there ye shall see him even as he
told you.' By these three women may be under
stood the three sects of the active life, that is,
the Epicureans, the Stoics, and the Peripatetics,
who go to the tomb, that is, to the present life,

82 DANTE

which is a receptacle of things corruptible, and
seek the Saviour, that is, beatitude, and find him
not, but they find a youth in white raiment, who,
according to the testimony of Matthew and the
rest, was an angel of God. This angel is that
nobleness of ours which comes from God, as
hath been said, which speaks in our reason and
says to each of these sects, that is, to whoever
goes seeking beatitude in this life, that it is not
here, but go and say to the disciples and to
Peter, that is, to those who go seeking it and
those who are gone astray (like Peter who had
denied), that it will go before them into Galilee,
that is, into speculation. Galilee is as much as
to say Whiteness. Whiteness is a body full of
corporeal light more than any other, and so
contemplation is fuller of spiritual light than
anything else here below. And he says, c it will
go before,' and does not say, c it will be with you,'
to give us to understand that God always goes
before our contemplation, nor can we ever over
take here Him who is our supreme beatitude.
And it is said, ( There ye shall see him as he
told you,' that is, here ye shall have of his sweet
ness, that is, felicity, as is promised you here,
that is, as it is ordained that ye can have. And
thus it appears that we find our beatitude, this
felicity of which we are speaking, first imperfect
in the active life, that is, in the operations of
the moral virtues, and afterwards well-nigh per-

DANTE 83

feet in the operation of the intellectual ones, the
which two operations are speedy and most direct
ways to lead to the supreme beatitude, the which
cannot be had here, as appears by what has been
said." '

At first sight there may seem to be some
want of agreement in what Dante says here of
the soul's incapacity of the vision of God in
this life with the triumphant conclusion of his
own poem. But here as elsewhere Dante must
be completed and explained by himself. " We
must know that everything most greatly desires
its own perfection, and in that its every desire
is appeased, and by that everything is desired.
[That is, the one is drawn toward, the other
draws.] And this is that desire which makes
every delight maimed, for no delight is so great
in this life that it can take away from the soul
this thirst so that desire remain not in the
thought." " And 2 since it is most natural to
wish to be in God, the human soul naturally
wills it with all longing. And since its being
depends on God and is preserved thereby, it
naturally desires and wills to be united with
God in order to fortify its being. And since in
the goodnesses of human nature is shown some
reason for those of the Divine, it follows that
the human soul unites itself in a spiritual way

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 22.
a Ibid, tratt. in. c. 6.

84 DANTE

with those so much the more strongly and
quickly as they appear more perfect, and this
appearance happens according as the knowledge
of the soul is clear or impeded. And this union
is what we call Love, whereby may be known
what is within the soul, seeing those it outwardly
loves. . . . And the human soul which is ennobled
with the ultimate potency, that is, reason, par
ticipates in the Divine nature after the manner
of an eternal Intelligence, because the soul is so
ennobled and denuded of matter in that sovran
potency that the Divine light shines in it as in
an angel." r This union with God may there
fore take place before the warfare of life is over,
but is only possible for souls perfettamente na-
turatiy perfectly endowed by nature.2 This de
pends on the virtue of the generating soul and
the concordant influence of the planets. " And
if it happen that through the purity of the re
cipient soul, the intellectual virtue be well ab
stracted and absolved from every corporeal
shadow, the Divine bounty is multiplied in it

1 Convito, tratt. in. c. 2. By potenzia and potenza Dante
means the faculty of receiving influences or impressions.
{Paradiso, xm. 61; xxix. 34.) Reason is the "sovran
potency " because it makes us capable of God.
2 «' O thou well-born, unto whom Grace concedes
To see the thrones of the Eternal triumph,
Or ever yet the warfare be abandoned."

(Paradiso, v. 115-118.)

DANTE 85

as in a thing sufficient to receive the same." '
" And there are some who believe that if all the
aforesaid virtues [powers] should unite for the
production of a soul in their best disposition, so
much of the Deity would descend into it that
it would be almost another incarnate God/' 2
Did Dante believe himself to be one of these ?
He certainly gives us reason to think so. He
was born under fortunate stars, as he twice tells
us,3 and he puts the middle of his own life at
the thirty-fifth year, which is the period he
assigns for it in the diviner sort of men.4

The stages of Dante's intellectual and moral
growth may, we think, be reckoned with some
approach to exactness from data supplied by
himself. In the poems of the " Vita Nuova,"
Beatrice, until her death, was to him simply a
poetical ideal, a type of abstract beauty, chosen
according to the fashion of the day after the
manner of Prove^al poets, but in a less carnal
sense than theirs. <c And by the fourth nature
of animals, that is, the sensitive, man has another
love whereby he loves according to sensible ap
pearance, even as a beast. . . . And by the fifth
and final nature, that is, the truly human, or, to
speak better, angelic, that is, rational, man has

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 21.

a Ibid, tratt. iv. c. 21.

3 Inferno, xv. 55, 56; Paradiso, xxn. 112-117.

* ConvitOy tratt. iv. c. 23 (cf. Inferno, i. i).

86 DANTE

a love for truth and virtue. . . . Wherefore,
since this nature is called mind, I said that love
discoursed in my mind to make it understood
that this love was that which is born in the no
blest of natures, that is, [the love] of truth and
virtue, and to shut out every false opinion by which
it might be suspected that my love was for the de
light of sense." ' This is a very weighty affirma
tion, made, as it is, so deliberately by a man of
Dante's veracity, who would and did speak truth
at every hazard. Let us dismiss at once and for
ever all the idle tales of Dante's amours, of la
Montanina, Gentucca, Pietra, Lisetta, and the
rest, to that outer darkness of impure thoughts
la onde la stoltezza dipartille* We think Miss

1 Convito, tratt. m. c. 3; Paradiso, xvm. 108—130.

2 See an excellent discussion and elucidation of this matter
by Witte, who so highly deserves the gratitude of all students
of Dante, in Dante Alighier? s Lyrische Gedichte> theil 11.
pp. 48—57. It was kindly old Boccaccio, who, without
thinking any harm, first set this nonsense a-going. His Life
of Dante is mainly a rhetorical exercise. After making Dante's
marriage an excuse for revamping all the old slanders against
matrimony, he adds gravely, " Certainly I do not affirm these
things to have happened to Dante, for I do not know it,
though it be true that (whether things like these or others
were the cause of it), once parted from her, he would never
come where she was nor suffer her to come where he was,
for all that she was the mother of several children by him."
That he did not come to her is not wonderful, for he would
have been burned alive if he had. Dante could not send for
her because he was a homeless wanderer. She remained in

DANTE 87

Rossetti a little hasty in allowing that in the
years which immediately followed Beatrice's
death Dante gave himself up " more or less to
sensual gratification and earthly aim." The
earthly aim we in a certain sense admit ; the
sensual gratification we reject as utterly incon
sistent, not only with Dante's principles, but
with his character and indefatigable industry.
Miss Rossetti illustrates her position by a subtle
remark on "the lulling spell of an intellectual
and sensitive delight in good running parallel
with a voluntary and actual indulgence in evil."
The dead Beatrice beckoned him toward the life
of contemplation, and it was precisely during
this period that he attempted to find happiness
in the life of action. " Verily it is to be known
that we may in this life have two felicities,

Florence with her children because she had powerful relations
and perhaps property there. It is plain, also, that what Boc
caccio says of Dante's lussuria had no better foundation. It
gave him a chance to turn a period. He gives no particu
lars, and his general statement is simply incredible. Lionardo
Bruni and Vellutello long ago pointed out the trifling and fic
titious character of this Life. Those familiar with Dante's
allegorical diction will not lay much stress on the literal mean
ing of pargoletta in Purgatorio, xxxi. 59. Gentucca, of
course, was a real person, one of those who had shown hos
pitality to the exile. Dante remembers them all somewhere,
for gratitude (which is quite as rare as genius) was one of the
virtues of his unforgetting nature. Boccaccio's Comment is
later and far more valuable than the Life.

88 DANTE

following two ways, good and best, which lead
us thither. The one is the active, the other the
contemplative life, the which (though by the
active we may attain, as has been said, unto good
felicity) leads us to the best felicity and blessed
ness." l " The life of my heart, that is, of my
inward self, was wont to be a sweet thought
which went many times to the feet of God, that
is to say, in thought I contemplated the king
dom of the Blessed. And I tell the final cause
why I mounted thither in thought when I say,
* Where it [the sweet thought] beheld a lady in
glory/ that I might make it understood that I
was and am certain, by her gracious revelation,
that she was in heaven (not on earth, as I had
vainly imagined), whither I went in thought,
so often as was possible to me, as it were rapt." 2
This passage exactly answers to another in " Pur-
gatorio," xxx. 109-138 : —

" Not only by the work of those great wheels
That destine every seed unto some end,
According as the stars are in conjunction,
But by the largess of celestial graces,

Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentially, that every righteous habit
Would have made admirable proof in him;

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 17; Purgatorio, xxvu. 100-108.
3 Convito, tratt. n. c. 8.

DANTE 89

Some time did I sustain him with my look
Revealing unto him my youthful eyes,
I led him with me turned in the right way.

As soon as ever of my second age

I was upon the threshold and changed life,
Himself from me he took and gave to others.

When from the flesh to spirit I ascended,

And beauty and virtue were in me increased,
I was to him less dear and less delightful;

And into ways untrue he turned his steps,
Pursuing the false images of good,
That never any promises fulfil r

Nor prayer for inspiration me availed,2

By means of which in dreams and otherwise
I called him back, so little did he heed them.

So low he fell, that all appliances

For his salvation were already short,

Save showing him the people of perdition. "

Now Dante himself, we think, gives us the clue,
by following which we may reconcile the contra
diction, what Miss Rossetti calls " the astound
ing discrepancy/' between the Lady of the
"Vita Nuova" who made him unfaithful to
Beatrice, and the same Lady in the " Convito,"
who in attributes is identical with Beatrice her
self. We must remember that the prose part

1 That is, wholly fulfil, rendono inter a.

2 We should prefer here —

" Nor inspirations -won by prayer availed " —

as better expressing Ne /' impetrare spirazion. Mr. Long
fellow's translation is so admirable for its exactness as well as
its beauty that it may be thankful for the minutest criticism,
such only being possible.

90 DANTE

of the " Convito," which is a comment on the
" Canzoni," was written after the " Canzoni "
themselves. How long after we cannot say with
certainty, but it was plainly composed at inter
vals, a part of it probably after Dante had en
tered upon old age (which began, as he tells
us, with the forty-fifth year), consequently after
1310. Dante had then written a considerable
part of the " Divina Commedia" in which Bea
trice was to go through her final and most ethe
real transformation in his mind and memory.
We say in his memory, for such idealizations
have a very subtle retrospective action, and the
new condition of feeling or thought is uneasy
till it has half unconsciously brought into har
mony whatever is inconsistent with it in the
past. The inward life unwillingly admits any
break in its continuity, and nothing is more
common than to hear a man, in venting an
opinion taken up a week ago, say with perfect
sincerity, cc I have always thought so and so."
Whatever belief occupies the whole mind soon
produces the impression on us of having long
had possession of it, and one mode of conscious
ness blends so insensibly with another that it is
impossible to mark by an exact line where one
begins and the other ends. Dante in his exposi
tion of the " Canzoni " must have been subject
to this subtlest and most deceitful of influences.
He would try to reconcile so far as he conscien-

DANTE 9'

tiously could his present with his past. This he
could do by means of the allegorical interpreta
tion. " For it would be a great shame to him,"
he says in the "Vita Nuova," "who should
poetize something under the vesture of some
figure or rhetorical color, and afterwards, when
asked, could not strip his words of that vesture
in such wise that they should have a true mean
ing." Now in the literal exposition of the " Can
zone " beginning, " Voi che intendendo il terzo
ciel movete," ' he tells us that the grandezza of
the Donna Gentil was "temporal greatness" (one
certainly of the felicities attainable by way of the
vita attiva), and immediately after gives us a hint
by which we may comprehend why a proud 2 man
might covet it. " How much wisdom and how
great a persistence in virtue (abito virtuoso] are
hidden for want of this lustre ! " 3 When Dante
reaches the Terrestrial Paradise 4 which is the
highest felicity of this world, and therefore the
consummation of the Active Life, he is wel
comed by a Lady who is its symbol, —

" Who went along
Singing and culling floweret after floweret," —

1 Which he cites in the Paradiso, vm. 37.

2 Dante confesses his guiltiness of the sin of pride, which
(as appears by the examples he gives of it) included ambition,
in Pur gat or to, xm. 136, 137.

3 Convito, tratt. n. c. 1 1 .

4 Purgatorioy xxvin.

92 DANTE

and warming herself in the rays of Love, or
" actual speculation," that is, "where love makes
its peace felt." ' That she was the symbol of
this is evident from the previous dream of
Dante,2 in which he sees Leah, the universally
accepted type of it, —

t( Walking in a meadow,

Gathering flowers; and singing she was saying,
' Know whosoever may my name demand
That I am Leah, and go moving round
My beauteous hands to make myself a garland,' " —

that is to say, of good works. She, having
" washed him thoroughly from sin/' 3 —

" All dripping brought
Into the dance of the four beautiful," 4 —

who are the intellectual virtues Prudence, Jus
tice, Temperance, and Fortitude, the four stars,
guides of the Practical Life, which he had seen
when he came out of the Hell where he had
beheld the results of sin, and arrived at the foot
of the Mount of Purification. That these were
the special virtues of practical goodness Dante

1 Purgatorio, xxvm. 40-44; Convito, tratt. in. c. 13.

2 Purgatorioy xxvu. 94—105.

3 Psalm li. 2. " And therefore I say that her [Philosophy's]
beauty, that is, morality, rains flames of fire, that is, a righteous
appetite which is generated in the love of moral doctrine, the
which appetite removes us from the natural as well as other
vices." (Convito, tratt. in. c. 15.)

4 Purgatorioy xxxi. 103, 104.

DANTE 93

had already told us in a passage before quoted
from the " Convito." x That this was Dante's
meaning is confirmed by what Beatrice says to
him,2 —

" Short while shalt thou be here a forester (silvano)
And thou shalt be with me forevermore
A citizen of that Rome where Christ is Roman ' ' ;

for by a " forest " he always means the world
of life and action.3 At the time when Dante
was writing the " Canzoni," on which the "Con
vito " was a comment, he believed science to be
the " ultimate perfection itself, and not the way
to it,"4 but before the " Convito" was composed
he had become aware of a higher and purer light,
an inward light, in that Beatrice, already clarified
well-nigh to a mere image of the mind, " who
lives in heaven with the angels, and on earth
with my soul/' 5

So spiritually does Dante always present Bea
trice to us, even where most corporeal, as in the
"Vita Nuova," that many, like Biscione and
Rossetti, have doubted her real existence. But
surely we must consent to believe that she who
speaks of

" The fair limbs wherein
I was enclosed, which scattered are in earth ' ' —

1 Tratt. iv. c. 22. 2 Pur gator ioy xxxn. 100-102.

3 Such is the selva oscura (Inferno y i. 2), such the selva
erronea di questa vita (Convito, trait, iv. c. 24).

4 Convito, tratt. i. c. 13. s Ibid, tratt. n. c. 2.

94 DANTE

was once a creature of flesh and blood, —

" A creature not too bright and good
For human nature's daily food."

When she died, Dante's grief, like that of Con
stance, filled her room up with something fairer
than the reality had ever been. There is no
idealizer like unavailing regret, all the more if
it be a regret of fancy as much as of real feel
ing. She early began to undergo that change
into something rich and strange in the sea ' of
his mind which so completely supernaturalized
her at last. It is not impossible, we think, to
follow the process of transformation. During
the period of the " Convito Canzoni," when he
had so given himself to study that to his weak
ened eyes " the stars were shadowed with a white
blur," 2 this star of his imagination was eclipsed
for a time with the rest. As his love had never
been of the senses (which is bestial3), so his
sorrow was all the more ready to be irradiated
with celestial light, and to assume her to be the
transmitter of it who had first awakened in him
the nobler impulses of his nature, —

(" Such had this man become in his New Life
Potentially"), —

1 Mar di tutto it senno, he calls Virgil (Inferno, vin. 7).
Those familiar with his own works will think the phrase singu
larly applicable to himself.

2 Convito, tratt. in. c. 9. 3 Ibid, tratt. m. c. 3.

DANTE 95

and given him the first hints of a higher, nay, of
the highest good. With that turn for double
meaning and abstraction which was so strong in
him, her very name helped him to allegorize her
into one who makes blessed (beat\ and thence
the step was a short one to personify in her that
Theosophy which enables man to see God and
to be mystically united with him even in the
flesh. Already, in the "Vita Nuova," ' she ap
pears to him as afterwards in the Terrestrial
Paradise, clad in that color of flame which belongs
to the seraphim who contemplate God in him
self, simply, and not in his relation to the Son
or the Holy Spirit.3 When misfortune came
upon him, when his schemes of worldly activity
failed, and science was helpless to console, as it
had never been able wholly to satisfy, she already
rose before him as the lost ideal of his youth,
reproaching him with his desertion of purely
spiritual aims. It is, perhaps, in allusion to this
that he fixes the date of her death with such
minute precision on the 9th June, 1290, most
probably his own twenty -fifth birthday, on which
he passed the boundary of adolescence.3

1 Vita Nuova, XL. * Convito, tratt. n. c. 6.

3 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 24. The date of Dante's birth is
uncertain, but the period he assigns for it (^Paradiso, xxn.
112—117) extends from the middle of May to the middle of
June. If we understand Bud's astrological comment, the day
should fall in June rather than May.

96 DANTE

That there should seem to be a discrepancy
between the Lady of the " Vita Nuova " and
her of the " Convito," Dante himself was al
ready aware when writing the former and com
menting it. Explaining the sonnet beginning
Gentil pensier, he says, "In this sonnet I make
two parts of myself according as my thoughts
were divided in two. The one part I call hearty
that is, the appetite, the other sou/, that is, rea
son. ... It is true that in the preceding son
net I take side with the heart against the eyes
[which were weeping for the lost Beatrice], and
that appears contrary to what I say in the pre
sent one ; and therefore I say that in that sonnet
also I mean by my heart the appetite, because
my desire to remember me of my most gentle
Lady was still greater than to behold this one,
albeit I had already some appetite for her, but
slight as should seem : whence it appears that
the one saying is not contrary to the other." '
When, therefore, Dante speaks of the love of
this Lady as the " adversary of Reason" he uses
the word in its highest sense, not as understand
ing (Intellectus\ but as synonymous with soul.
Already, when the latter part of the " Vita
Nuova," nay, perhaps the whole of the explan
atory portion of it, was written, the plan of the

1 Vita Nuova, xxxix. Compare for a different view, The
New Life of Dante, an Essay with Translations, by C. E.
Norton, pp. 92 et seq.

DANTE 97

" Commedia " was complete, a poem the higher
aim of which was to keep the soul alive both in
this world and for the next. As Dante tells us,
the contradiction in his mind was, though he
did not become aware of it till afterwards, more
apparent than real. He sought consolation in
study, and, failing to find it in Learning (scienza),
he was led to seek it in Wisdom (sapienza),
which is the love of God and the knowledge of
him.1 He had sought happiness through the

1 There is a passage in the Convito (tratt. in. c. 15) in
which Dante seems clearly to make the distinction asserted
above, " And therefore the desire of man is limited in this
life to that knowledge (scienza} which may here be had,
and passes not save by error that point which is beyond our
natural understanding. And so is limited and measured in
the angelic nature the amount of that wisdom which the nature
of each is capable of receiving." Man is, according to Dante,
superior to the angels in this, that he is capable both of reason
and contemplation, while they are confined to the latter. That
Beatrice's reproaches refer to no human pargoletta, the con
text shows, where Dante asks, —

" But wherefore so beyond my power of sight
Soars your desirable discourse, that aye
The more I strive, so much the more I lose it ?
' That thou mayst recognize,' she said, ' the school

Which thou hast followed, and mayst see how far
Its doctrine follows after my discourse,
And mayst behold your path from the divine
Distant as far as separated is
From earth the heaven that highest hastens on.'

(Purgatorio, xxxni. 82-90.)

The pargoletta in its ordinary sense was necessary to the
literal and human meaning, but it is shockingly discordant with

98 DANTE

understanding ; he was to find it through intui
tion. The lady Philosophy (according as she
is moral or intellectual) includes both. Her
gradual transfiguration is exemplified in passages
already quoted. The active life leads indirectly
by a knowledge of its failures and sins (" In
ferno "), or directly by a righteous employment
of it (" Purgatorio "), to the same end. The use
of the sciences is to induce in us the ultimate
perfection, that of speculating upon truth ; the
use of the highest of them, theology, the contem
plation of God.1 To this they all lead up. In
one of those curious chapters of the "Convito,"*
where he points out the analogy between the
sciences and the heavens, Dante tells us that he
compares moral philosophy with the crystalline
heaven or Primum Mobile, because it commu
nicates life and gives motion to all the others
below it. But what gives motion to the crys
talline heaven (Moral Philosophy) itself? "The
most fervent appetite which it has in each of
its parts to be conjoined with each part of that
most divine quiet heaven " (Theology).3 Theo-

that non-natural interpretation which, according to Dante's
repeated statement, lays open the true and divine meaning.

1 " So then they that are in the flesh cannot please God.
But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the
Spirit of God dwell in you.'* (Romans viii. 8, 9.)

2 Convito, tratt. n. c. 14, 15.

3 Ibid, tratt. n. c. 4. Cf. Paradise, i. 76, 77.

DANTE 99

logy, the divine science, corresponds with the
Empyrean, " because of its peace, the which,
through the most excellent certainty of its sub
ject, which is God, suffers no strife of opinions
or sophistic arguments.1 No one of the hea
vens is at rest but this, and in none of the infe
rior sciences can we find repose, though he likens
physics to the heaven of the fixed stars, in whose
name is a suggestion of the certitude to be ar
rived at in things demonstrable. Dante had this
comparison in mind, it may be inferred, when
he said, —

" Well I perceive that never sated is

Our intellect unless the Truth illume it
Beyond which nothing true 2 expands itself.

It rests therein as wild beast in his lair,

When it attains it; and it can attain it;
If not, then each desire would frustrate be.

Therefore springs up, in fashion of a shoot,

Doubt at the foot of truth; and this is nature,
Which to the top from height to height impels us." 3

The contradiction, as it seems to us, resolves
itself into an essential, easily apprehensible, if
mystical, unity. Dante at first gave himself to
the study of the sciences (after he had lost the
simple, unquestioning faith of youth) as the
means of arriving at certainty. From the root

1 " Vain babblings and oppositions of science falsely so
called." (i Tim. vi. 20.)

2 That is, no partial truth.

3 Paradiso, iv. 124-132.

ioo DANTE

of every truth to which he attained sprang this
sucker (rampolld) of doubt, drawing out of it the
very sap of its life. In this way was Philosophy
truly an adversary of his soul, and the reason
of his remorse for fruitless studies which drew
him away from the one that alone was and could
be fruitful is obvious enough. But by and by
out of the very doubt came the sweetness T of
a higher and truer insight. He became aware
that there were " things in heaven and earth
undreamt of in your philosophy," as another
doubter said, who had just finished his studies,
but could not find his way out of the scepticism
they engendered as Dante did.

" Insane is he who hopeth that our reason

Can traverse the illimitable way,

Which the one Substance in three Persons follows !
Mortals, remain contented at the Quia;

For if ye had been able to see all,

No need there were [had been] for Mary to give birth.
And ye have seen desiring without fruit

Those whose desire would have been quieted,

Which evermore is given them for a grief.
I speak of Aristotle and of Plato

And others many." 2

1 " Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong
came forth sweetness." (Judges xiv. 14.)

a Purgatorioy in. 34—44. The allusions in this passage
are all to sayings of St. Paul, of whom Dante was plainly a
loving reader. " Remain contented at the Quia," that is, be
satisfied with knowing that things are, without inquiring too
nicely how or why. " Being justified by faith we have peace

DANTE ioi

Whether at the time when the poems of the
" Vita Nuova " were written, the Lady who
withdrew him for a while from Beatrice was
(which we doubt) a person of flesh and blood
or not, she was no longer so when the prose
narrative was composed. Any one familiar with
Dante's double meanings will hardly question
that by putting her at a window, which is a

with God " (Rom. v. i). Infinita via : t( O the depth of
the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! How
unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding
out!" (Rom. xi. 33.) Aristotle and Plato: " For the
wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
and unrighteousness of men who hold the truth in unright
eousness. . . . For the invisible things of him from the crea
tion of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the
things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead,
so that they are without excuse. Because that when they knew
God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful,
but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart
was darkened" (Rom i. 18-21). He refers to the Greeks.
The Epistle to the Romans, by the way, would naturally
be Dante's favorite. As St. Paul made the Law, so he
would make Science, «' our schoolmaster to bring us unto
Christ, that we might be justified by faith " (Gal. iii. 24).
He puts Aristotle and Plato in his Inferno, because they did
not "adore God duly" (Inferno, iv. 38), that is, they
"held the truth in unrighteousness." Yet he calls Aristotle
" the master and guide of human reason" ( Convito, tratt. iv.
c. 6), and Plato " a most excellent man " (Ibid, tratt. 11.
c. 5). Plato and Aristotle, like all Dante's figures, are types.
We must disengage our thought from the individual, and fix it
on the genus.

102 DANTE

place to look out of, he intended to imply that
she personified Speculation, a word which he
uses with a wide range of meaning, sometimes
as looking for, sometimes as seeing (like Shake
speare's

" There is no speculation in those eyes "),

sometimes as intuition^ or the beholding all
things in God, who is the cause of all. This is
so obvious, and the image in this sense so famil
iar, that we are surprised it should have been
hitherto unremarked. It is plain that, even
when the " Vita Nuova " was written, the Lady
was already Philosophy, but philosophy applied
to a lower range of thought, not yet ascended
from flesh to spirit. The Lady who seduced
him was the science which looks for truth in
second causes, or even in effects, instead of
seeking it, where alone it can be found, in the
First Cause ; she was the Philosophy which
looks for happiness in the visible world (of
shadows), and not in the spiritual (and therefore
substantial) world. The guerdon of his search
was doubt. But Dante, as we have seen, made
his very doubts help him upward toward cer
tainty ; each became a round in the ladder by
which he climbed to clearer and clearer vision
till the end.1 Philosophy had made him forget

1 It is to be remembered that Dante has typified the same
thing when he describes how Reason (Virgil) first carries

DANTE 103

Beatrice; it was Philosophy who was to bring
him back to her again, washed clean in that
very stream of forgetfulness that had made an
impassable barrier between them.1 Dante had
known how to find in her the gift of Achil-
les's lance, —

" Which used to be the cause
First of a sad and then a gracious boon." a

There is another possible, and even probable,
theory which would reconcile the Beatrice of
the " Purgatorio " with her of the " Vita

him down by clinging to the fell of Satan, and then in the
same way upwards again a riveder le stelle. Satan is the
symbol of materialism, fixed at the point

" To which things heavy draw from every side " j —

as God is Light and Warmth, so is he "cold obstruction";
the very effort which he makes to rise by the motion of his
wings begets the chilly blast that freezes him more immovably
in his place of doom. The danger of all science save the
highest (theology) was that it led to materialism. There ap
pears to have been a great deal of it in Florence in the time
of Dante. Its followers called themselves Epicureans, and
burn in living tombs (Inferno, x.). Dante held them in spe
cial horror. "Of all bestialities that is the most foolish and
vile and hurtful which believes there is no other life after
this." " And I so believe, so affirm, and so am certain that
we pass to another better life after this ' ' ( Convito, tratt. n.
c. 9). It is a fine divination of Carlyle from the Non han spe-
ranza di morte that " one day it had risen sternly benign in
the scathed heart of Dante that he, wretched, never resting,
worn as he was, would [should] full surely die."

1 Purgatorio, xxxi. 103. * Inferno, xxxi. 5, 6.

io4 DANTE

Nuova." Suppose that even in the latter she
signified Theology, or at least some influence
that turned his thoughts to God ? Pietro di
Dante, commenting the fargoletta passage in
the " Purgatorio," says expressly that the poet
had at one time given himself to the study of
theology and deserted it for poesy and other
mundane sciences. This must refer to a period
beginning before 1290. Again, there is an early
tradition that Dante in his youth had been a
novice in a Franciscan convent, but never took
the vows. Buti affirms this expressly in his
comment on "Inferno," xvi. 106-123. It is
perhaps slightly confirmed by what Dante says
in the tc Convito," * that " one can not only turn
to Religion by making himself like in habit and
life to St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis,
and St. Dominic, but likewise one may turn to
good and true religion in a state of matrimony,
for God wills no religion in us but of the heart."
If he had ever thought of taking monastic vows,
his marriage would have cut short any such
intention. If he ever wished to wed the real
Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed, might
not this be the time when his thoughts took that
direction ? If so, the impulse came indirectly,
at least, from her.

We have admitted that Beatrice Portinari
was a real creature, —

1 Tratt. iv. c. 28.

DANTE 105

" Col sangue suo e con le sue giunture "; —

but how real she was, and whether as real to the
poet's memory as to his imagination, may fairly
be questioned. She shifts, as the controlling
emotion or the poetic fitness of the moment
dictates, from a woman loved and lost to a gra
cious exhalation of all that is fairest in woman
hood or most divine in the soul of man, and
ere the eye has defined the new image it has be
come the old one again, or another mingled of
both.

" Nor one nor other seemed now what he was;
E'en as proceeded! on before the flame

Upward along the paper a brown color,

Which is not black as yet, and the white dies." '

As the mystic Griffin in the eyes of Beatrice
(her demonstrations), so she in his own, —

" Now with the one, now with the other nature;
Think, Reader, if within myself I marvelled
When I beheld the thing itself stand still
And in its image it transformed itself." 2

At the very moment when she had under
gone her most sublimated allegorical evapo
ration, his instinct as poet, which never failed
him, realized her into woman again in those
scenes of almost unapproached pathos which
make the climax of his " Purgatorio." The

1 Inferno, xxv. 64-67.

2 Purgatorio, xxxi. 123—126.

106 DANTE

verses tremble with feeling and shine with tears.1
Beatrice recalls her own beauty with a pride as
natural as that of Fair Annie in the old bal
lad, and compares herself as advantageously
with the " brown, brown bride " who had sup
planted her. If this be a ghost, we do not need
be told that she is a woman still.2 We must

1 Spenser, who had, like Dante, a Platonizing side, and
who was probably the first English poet since Chaucer that
had read the Commedia, has imitated the pictorial part of these
passages in the Faery Queen (bk. vi. c. 10). He has
turned it into a compliment, and a very beautiful one, to a
living mistress. It is instructive to compare the effect of his
purely sensuous verses with that of Dante's, which have such
a wonderful reach behind them. They are singularly pleas
ing, but they do not stay by us as those of his model had
done by him. Spenser was, as Milton called him, a " sage
and serious poet " ; he would be the last to take offence if
we draw from him a moral not without its use now that
Priapus is trying to persuade us that pose and drapery will
make him as good as Urania. Better far the naked nastiness;
the more covert the indecency, the more it shocks. Poor
old god of gardens ! Innocent as a clownish symbol, he is
simply disgusting as an ideal of art. In the last century, they
set him up in Germany and in France as befitting an era of
enlightenment, the light of which came too manifestly from
the wrong quarter to be long endurable.

2 This touch of nature recalls another. The Italians claim
humor for Dante. We have never been able to find it, un
less it be in that passage {Inferno, xv. 119) where Brunetto
Latini lingers under the burning shower to recommend his
Tesoro to his former pupil. There is a comical touch of na
ture in an author's solicitude for his little work, not, as in

DANTE 107

remember, however, that Beatrice had to be real
that she might be interesting, to be beautiful
that her goodness might be persuasive, nay, to
be beautiful at any rate, because beauty has
also something in it of divine. Dante has told,
in a passage already quoted, that he would
rather his readers should find his doctrine sweet
than his verses, but he had his relentings from
this Stoicism.

Fielding's case, after ///, but his own damnation. We are
not sure, but we fancy we catch the momentary flicker of a
smile across those serious eyes of Dante's. There is some
thing like humor in the opening verses of Paradiso, xvi.,
where Dante tells us how even in heaven he could not help
glorying in being gently born, — he who had devoted a can
zone and a book of the Convito to proving that nobility con
sisted wholly in virtue. But there is, after all, something
touchingly natural in the feeling. Dante, unjustly robbed of
his property, and with it of the independence so dear to him,
seeing

11 Needy nothings trimmed in jollity,
And captive Good attending Captain 111," —

would naturally fall back on a distinction which money could
neither buy nor replace. There is a curious passage in the
Convito which shows how bitterly he resented his undeserved
poverty. He tells us that buried treasure commonly revealed it
self to the bad rather than the good. " Verily I saw the place
on the flanks of a mountain in Tuscany called Falterona, where
the basest peasant of the whole countryside digging found there
more than a bushel of pieces of the finest silver, which per
haps had awaited him more than a thousand years." (Tratt.
iv. c. II.) One can see the grimness of his face as he looked
and thought, "how salt a savor hath the bread of others ! "

io8 DANTE

" Canzone, I believe those will be rare
Who of thine inner sense can master all,
Such toil it costs thy native tongue to learn;
Wherefore, if ever it perchance befall
That thou in presence of such men shouldst fare
As seem not skilled thy meaning to discern,
I pray thee then thy grief to comfort turn,
Saying to them, ' O thou my new delight,
Take heed at least how fair I am to sight.' " 1

We believe all Dante's other Ladies to have
been as purely imaginary as the Dulcinea of Don
Quixote, useful only as motives, but a real Bea
trice is as essential to the human sympathies of
the " Divina Commedia " as her glorified Idea
to its allegorical teaching, and this Dante under
stood perfectly well.2 Take her out of the poem,
and the heart of it goes with her ; take out her
ideal, and it is emptied of its soul. She is the
menstruum in which letter and spirit dissolve
and mingle into unity. Those who doubt her
existence must find Dante's graceful sonnet 3 to
Guido Cavalcanti as provoking as Sancho's story
of his having seen Dulcinea winnowing wheat

1 L* Envoi of canzone xiv. of the Canzonierey i. of the
Convito. Dante cites the first verse of this canzone, Paradiso,
viii. 37.

* How Dante himself could allegorize even historical per
sonages may be seen in a curious passage of the Convito
(tratt. iv. c. 28), where, commenting on a passage of Lucan,
he treats Marcia and Cato as mere figures of speech.

3 Canzoniere, n. See Fraticelli's preface.

DANTE 109

was to his master, " so alien is it from all that
which eminent persons, who are constituted and
preserved for other exercises and entertainments,
do and ought to do.'* * But we should always
remember in reading Dante that with him the
allegorical interpretation is the true one (verace
sposizione), and that he represents himself (and
that at a time when he was known to the world
only by his minor poems) as having made right
eousness (rettitudine, in other words, moral
philosophy) the subject of his verse.2 Love
with him seems first to have meant the love of
truth and the search after it (speculazione), and
afterwards the contemplation of it in its infinite
source (speculazione in its higher and mystical
sense). This is the divine love " which where
it shines darkens and well-nigh extinguishes all
other loves/' 3 Wisdom is the object of it, and

1 Don Quixote, part n. c. viii.

* De Vulgari Eloquio, I. ii. c. 2. He says the same of
Giraud de Borneil, many of whose poems are moral and even
devotional. See, particularly, "Al honor Dieu torn en mon
chan " (Raynouard, Lex. Rom. i. 388), " Ben es dregz pos
en aital port" (ibid. 393), "Jois sia comensamens ' ' (ibid.
395), and " Be veg e conosc e say " (ibid. 398). Another
of his poems ("Ar ai grant joy," Raynouard, Choix, m.
304), may possibly be a mystical profession of love for the
Blessed Virgin, for whom, as Dante tells us, Beatrice had a
special devotion.

3 ConvitQy tratt. in. c. 14. In the same chapter is perhaps
an explanation of the two rather difficult verses which follow

no DANTE

the end of wisdom to contemplate God the true
mirror (verace speglio, speculum), wherein all
things are seen as they truly are. Nay, she her-

that in which the verace speglio is spoken of (Paradiso, xxvi.
107, 108).

" Che fa di se pareglie 1' altre cose
E nulla face lui di se pareglio."

Buti's comment is, "that is, makes of itself a receptacle to
other things, that is, to all things that exist, which are all seen
in it." Dante says {ubi supra}, "The descending of the
virtue of one thing into another is a reducing that other into a
likeness of itself. . . . Whence we see that the sun sending
his ray down hitherward reduces things to a likeness with his
light in so far as they are able by their disposition to receive
light from his power. So I say that God reduces this love to
a likeness with himself as much as it is possible for it to be like
him." In Proven 93! pareilh means like, and Dante may have
formed his word from it. But the four earliest printed texts
read: —

' ' Che fa di se pareglio all' altre cose. ' *

Accordingly we are inclined to think that the next verse should
be corrected thus : —

" E nulla face a lui di se pareglio."

We would form pareglio from parere (a something in which
things appear), as miraglio from mirare (a something in which
they are seen). God contains all things in himself, but nothing
can wholly contain him. The blessed behold all things in him
as if reflected, but not one of the things so reflected is capable
of his image in its completeness. This interpretation is con
firmed by Paradiso, xix. 49-5 1 .

" E quinci appar cV ogni minor natura
fe corto recettacolo a quel bene

Che non ha fine, e se con se misura * '

DANTE 1 1 1

self " is the brightness of the eternal light, the
unspotted mirror of the majesty of God."

1 Wisdom of Solomon, vii. 26, quoted by Dante ( Convito,
tratt. in. c. 15). There are other passages in the Wisdom of
Solomon besides that just cited which we may well believe
Dante to have had in his mind when writing the canzone,
beginning, —

" Amor che nella mente mi ragiona," —

and the commentary upon it, and some to which his experience
of life must have given an intenser meaning. The writer of
that book also personifies Wisdom as the mistress of his soul:
" I loved her and sought her out from my youth, I desired
to make her my spouse, and I was a lover of her beauty."
He says of Wisdom that she was " present when thou (God)
madest the world," and Dante in the same way identifies her
with the divine Logos, citing as authority the "beginning of
the Gospel of John." He tells us, "I perceived that I could
not otherwise obtain her except God gave her me," and Dante
came at last to the same conclusion. Again, "For the very
true beginning of her is the desire of discipline ; and the care
of discipline is love. And love is the keeping of her laws ; and
the giving heed unto her laws is the assurance of incorruption."
But who can doubt that he read with a bitter exultation, and
applied to himself passages like these which follow ? " When
the righteous fled from his brother9 s wrath, she guided him
in right paths, showed him the kingdom of God, and gave him
knowledge of holy things. She defended him from his enemies
and kept him safe from those that lay in wait, . . . that he
might know that godliness is stronger than all. . . . She
forsook him not, but delivered him from sin; she went down
with him into the pit, and left him not in bonds till she brought
him the sceptre of the kingdom, . . . and gave him perpetual
glory." It was, perhaps, from this book that Dante got the
hint of making his punishments and penances typical of the

ii2 DANTE

There are two beautiful passages in the " Con-
vito," which we shall quote, both because they
have, as we believe, a close application to Dante's
own experience, and because they are good speci
mens of his style as a writer of prose. In the
manly simplicity which comes of an earnest pur
pose, and in the eloquence of deep conviction,
this is as far beyond that of any of his contem
poraries as his verse ; nay, more, has hardly
been matched by any Italian from that day to
this. Illustrating the position that " the highest
desire of everything and the first given us by
Nature is to return to its first cause/' he says :
" And since God is the beginning of our souls
and the maker of them like unto himself, accord
ing as was written, ( Let us make man in our

sins that earned them. " Wherefore, whereas men lived dis
solutely and unrighteously, thou hast tormented them with
their own abominations. ' ' Dante was intimate with the Scrip
tures. They do even a scholar no harm. M. Victor Le Clerc,
in his His to ire Litter air e de la France au quatorzieme siecle
(tome ii. p. 72), thinks it "not impossible" that a passage
in the Lamentations of Jeremiah, paraphrased by Dante, may
have been suggested to him by Rutebeuf or Tristan, rather
than by the prophet himself ! Dante would hardly have found
himself so much at home in the company of jongleurs as in
that of prophets. Yet he was familiar with French and Pro-
venc^al poetry. Beside the evidence of the f^u/gari Eloquio,
there are frequent and broad traces in the Commedia of the
Roman de la Rose, slighter ones of the Chevalier de la Cha-
rette, Guillaume a" Orange, and a direct imitation of Bernard
de Ventadour.

DANTE 113

image and likeness/ this soul most greatly de
sires to return to him. And as a pilgrim who
goes by a way he has never travelled, who be
lieves every house he sees afar off to be his inn,
and not rinding it to be so directs his belief to
another, and so from house to house till he come
to the inn, so our soul forthwith on entering
upon the new and never-travelled road of this
life directs its eyes to the goal of its highest good,
and therefore believes whatever thing it sees that
seems to have in it any good to be that. And
because its first knowledge is imperfect by rea
son of not being experienced nor indoctrinated,
small goods seem to it great. Wherefore we see
children desire most greatly an apple, and then
proceeding further on desire a bird, and then
further yet desire fine raiment, and then a horse,
and then a woman, and then riches not great,
and then greater and greater. And this befalls
because in none of these things it finds that which
it goes seeking, and thinks to find it further on.
By which it may be seen that one desirable stands
before another in the eyes of our soul in a fashion
as it were pyramidal, for the smallest at first cov
ers the whole of them, and is as it were the apex
of the highest desirable, which is God, as it were
the base of all ; so that the further we go from
the apex toward the base the desirables appear
greater ; and this is the reason why human de
sires become wider one after the other. Verily

ii4 DANTE

this way is lost through error as the roads of
earth are ; for as from one city to another there
is of necessity one best and straightest way, and
one that always leads farther from it, that is, the
one which goes elsewhere, and many others,
some less roundabout and some less direct, so
in human life are divers roads whereof one is the
truest and another the most deceitful, and cer
tain ones less deceitful, and certain less true.
And as we see that that which goes most di
rectly to the city fulfils desire and gives repose
after weariness, and that which goes the other
way never fulfils it and never can give repose,
so it falls out in our life. The good traveller
arrives at the goal and repose, the erroneous
never arrives thither, but with much weariness
of mind, always with greedy eyes looks before
him." I If we may apply Dante's own method
of exposition to this passage, we find him tell
ing us that he first sought felicity in know
ledge, —

"That apple sweet which through so many branches
The care of mortals goeth in pursuit of," 2 —

then in fame, a bird that flits before us as we fol
low,3 then in being esteemed of men (" to be

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 12.

3 PurgatoriOy xxvu. 115, 116.

3 That Dante loved fame we need not be told. He several
times confesses it, especially in the De Vulgar i Eloquio, i. 17.
" How glorious she [the Vulgar Tongue] makes her intimates

DANTE 115

clothed in purple, ... to sit next to Darius,
. . . and be called Darius his cousin "), then in
power,1 then in the riches of the Holy Spirit in
larger and larger measure.2 He, too, had found
that there was but one straight road, whether to
the Terrestrial Paradise or the Celestial City,
and may come to question by and by whether
they be not parallel one with the other, or even
parts of the same road, by which only repose is
to be reached at last. Then, when in old age
" the noble soul returns to God as to that port
whence she set forth on the sea of this life, . . .
just as to him who comes from a long journey,
before he enters into the gate of his city, the
citizens thereof go forth to meet him, so the

\familiarest those of her household], we ourselves have
known, who in the sweetness of this glory put our exile be
hind our backs."

1 Dante several times uses the sitting a horse as an image
of rule. See especially Purgatorio, vi. 99, and Convito,
tratt. iv. c. 9.

2 " O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and the
knowledge of God ! " Dante quotes this in speaking of the
influence of the stars, which, interpreting it presently " by the
theological way/' he compares to that of the Holy Spirit.
" And thy counsel who hath known, except thou give wisdom
and send thy Holy Spirit from above ?" (Wisdom of Solo
mon, ix. 17.) The last words of the Convito are, " her [Phi
losophy] whose proper dwelling is in the depths of the
Divine mind." The ordinary reading is ragione (reason),
but it seems to us an obvious blunder for magione (mansion,
dwelling).

n6 DANTE

citizens of the eternal life go to meet her, and
do so because of her good deeds and contem
plations, who, having already betaken herself to
God, seems to see those whom she believes
to be nigh unto God." x This also was to be the
experience of Dante, for who can doubt that the
" Paradiso " was something very unlike a poet
ical exercise to him who appeals to the visions
even of sleep as proof of the soul's immortality ?
When did his soul catch a glimpse of that cer
tainty in which " the mind that museth upon
many things " can find assured rest ? We have
already said that 'we believe Dante's political
opinions to have taken their final shape and the
" De Monarchia " to have been written before
I3OO.2 That the revision of the " Vita Nuova "
was completed in that year seems probable from
the last sonnet but one, which is addressed to
pilgrims on their way to the Santa Veronica at
Rome.3 In this sonnet he still laments Beatrice

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 28.

2 He refers to a change in his own opinions (lib. HI. sec. I ),
where he says, " When I knew the nations to have mur
mured against the preeminence of the Roman people, and saw
the people imagining vain things as I myself was wont" He
was a Guelph by inheritance, he became a Ghibelline by con
viction.

3 It should seem from Dante' swords ("at the time when
much people went to see the blessed image,'* and "ye seem
to come from a far-off people ") that this was some extraordi
nary occasion, and what so likely as the jubilee of 1 300 ? (Cf.

DANTE 117

as dead ; he would make the pilgrims share his
grief. It is the very folly of despairing sorrow,
that calls on the first comer, stranger though he
be, for a sympathy which none can fully give,
and he least of all. But in the next sonnet, the
last in the book, there is a surprising change
of tone. The transfiguration of Beatrice has
begun, and we see completing itself that natural
gradation of grief which will ere long bring the
mourner to call on the departed saint to console
him for her own loss. The sonnet is remarkable
in more senses than one, first for its psycho
logical truth, and then still more for the light it
throws on Dante's inward history as poet and
thinker. Hitherto he had celebrated beauty and
goodness in the creature ; henceforth he was to
celebrate them in the Creator whose praise they
were.1 We give an extempore translation of this

Paradiso, xxxi. 103-108.) Dante's comparisons are so con
stantly drawn from actual eyesight, that this allusion (Inferno,
xin. 28-33) to a device of Boniface VIII. for passing the
crowds quietly across the bridge of St. Angelo, renders it not
unlikely that he was in Rome at that time, and perhaps con
ceived his poem there as Giovanni Villani his chronicle. That
Rome would deeply stir his mind and heart is beyond ques
tion. " And certes I am of a firm opinion that the stones that
stand in her walls are worthy of reverence, and the soil where
she sits worthy beyond what is preached and admitted of
men." (Convito, tratt. iv. c. 5.)

1 Beatrice, loda di Dio vera; Inferno, n. 103. " Surely
vain are all men by nature who are ignorant of God, and

n8 DANTE

sonnet, in which the meaning is preserved so far
as is possible where the grace is left out. We
remember with some compunction as we do
it, that Dante has said, " know every one that
nothing harmonized by a musical band can be
transmuted from its own speech to another with
out breaking all its sweetness and harmony," *
and Cervantes was of the same mind : 2 —

" Beyond the sphere that hath the widest gyre
Passeth the sigh 3 that leaves my heart below;

could not out of the good things that are seen know him that
is, neither by considering the works did they acknowledge
the work-master. . . . For, being conversant in his works,
they search diligently and believe their sight, because the things
are beautiful that are seen. Howbeit, neither are they to be
pardoned.*' (Wisdom of Solomon, xiii. I, 7, 8.) Non
adorar debit amente Dio. " For the invisible things of him
from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being under
stood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and
godhead; so that they are without excuse." It was these
"invisible things" whereof Dante was beginning to get a
glimpse.

1 ConvitOy tratt. i. c. 7.

2 "And here we would have forgiven Mr. Captain if he
had not betrayed him {traido, traduttore, traditore') to Spain
and made him a Castilian, for he took away much of his
native worth, and so will all those do who shall undertake to
turn a poem into another tongue; for with all the care they
take and ability they show, they will never reach the height
of its original conception," says the Curate, speaking of a
translation of Ariosto. {Don Quixote, part i. c. 6.)

3 In his own comment Dante says, " I tell whither goes
my thought, calling it by the name of one of its effects."

DANTE 119

A new intelligence doth love bestow

On it with tears that ever draws it higher;

When it wins thither where is its desire,

A Lady it beholds who honor so

And light receives, that, through her splendid glow,

The pilgrim spirit x sees her as in fire;

It sees her such, that, telling me again

I understand it not, it speaks so low

Unto the mourning heart that bids it tell;

Its speech is of that noble One I know,

For ' Beatrice ' I often hear full plain,

So that, dear ladies, I conceive it well."

No one can read this in its connection with
what goes before and what follows without feel
ing that a new conception of Beatrice had
dawned upon the mind of Dante, dim as yet,
or purposely made to seem so, and yet the
authentic forerunner of the fulness of her rising
as the light of his day and the guide of his feet,
the divine wisdom whose glory pales all meaner
stars. The conception of a poem in which
Dante's creed in politics and morals should be
picturesquely and attractively embodied, and of
the high place which Beatrice should take in it,
had begun vaguely to shape itself in his thought.
As he brooded over it, of a sudden it defined
itself clearly. " Soon after this sonnet there
appeared to me a marvellous vision 2 wherein I

1 Spirito means in Italian both breath (jpirto ed acqua
fessi; Purgatorio xxx. 98) and spirit.

2 By visione Dante means something seen waking by the
inner eye. He believed also that dreams were sometimes

120 DANTE

saw things which made me propose not to say
more of that blessed one until I could treat of
her more worthily. And to arrive at that I
study all I can, as she verily knows. So that,
if it be the pleasure of Him through whom all
things live, that my life hold out yet a few years,
I hope to say that of her which was never yet
said of any (woman). And then may it please
Him who is the Lord of Courtesy that my soul
may go to see the glory of her Lady, that is,
of that blessed Beatrice who gloriously beholds
the face of Him qui est per omnia saecula bene-
dictus" It was the method of presentation that
became clear to Dante at this time, — the plan
of the great poem for whose completion the
experience of earth and the inspiration of heaven
were to combine, and which was to make him
lean for many years.1 The doctrinal scope of
it was already determined. Man, he tells us, is
the only creature who partakes at once of the
corruptible and incorruptible nature ; " and since
every nature is ordained to some ultimate end,
it follows that the end of man is double. And
as among all beings he alone partakes of the
corruptible and incorruptible, so alone among
all beings he is ordained to a double end,
whereof the one is his end as corruptible, the

divinely inspired, and argues from such the immortality of the
soul. (Convito, tratt. n. c. 9.)
1 Paradiso, xxv. 1-3.

DANTE 121

other as incorruptible. That unspeakable Provi
dence therefore foreordered two ends to be pur
sued by man, to wit, beatitude in this life, which
consists in the operation of our own virtue, and
is figured by the Terrestrial Paradise, and the
beatitude of life eternal, which consists in a frui
tion of the divine countenance, whereto our own
virtue cannot ascend unless aided by divine
light, which is understood by the Celestial Para
dise." The one we attain by practice of the
moral and intellectual virtues as they are taught
by philosophers, the other by spiritual teachings
transcending human reason, and the practice of
the theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and
Charity. For one, Reason suffices (" which was
wholly made known to us by philosophers "),
for the other we need the light of supernatural
truth revealed by the Holy Spirit and "needful
for us." Men led astray by cupidity turn their
backs on both, and in their bestiality need bit
and rein to keep them in the way. " Wherefore
to man was a double guidance needful according
to the double end," the Supreme Pontiff in
spiritual, the Emperor in temporal things.1

1 De Monarchia, lib. in. sec. ult. See the whole passage
in Miss Rossetti, p. 39. It is noticeable that Dante says that
the pope is to lead (by example), the emperor to direct (by
the enforcing of justice). The duty, we are to observe, was
a double but not a divided one. To exemplify this unity
was indeed one object of the Commedia.

122 DANTE

But how to put this theory of his into a poetic
form which might charm while it was teaching ?
He would typify Reason in Virgil (who would
serve also as a symbol of political wisdom as hav
ing celebrated the founding of the Empire), and
the grace of God in that Beatrice whom he had
already supernaturalized into something which
passeth all understanding. In choosing Virgil
he was sure of that interest and sympathy which
his instinct led him to seek in the predisposition
of his readers, for the popular imagination of the
Middle Ages had busied itself particularly with
the Mantuan poet. The Church had given him
a quasi-orthodoxy by interpreting his jam redit et
virgo as a prophecy of the birth of Christ. At
Naples he had become a kind of patron saint,
and his bones were exhibited as relics. Dante
himself may have heard at Mantua the hymn
sung on the anniversary of St. Paul, in which the
apostle to the Gentiles is represented as weeping
at the tomb of the greatest of poets. Above all,
Virgil had described the descent of ^Eneas to the
underworld. Dante's choice of a guide was there
fore, in a certain degree, made for him. But the
mere Reason1 of man without the illumination

1 " What Reason seeth here
Myself [Virgil] can tell theej beyond that await
For Beatrice, since 't is a work of Faith. " (Pur. xvm. 46-48. )

Beatrice here evidently impersonates Theology. It would be
interesting to know what was the precise date of Dante's
theological studies. The earlier commentators all make him

DANTE 123

of divine Grace cannot be trusted, and accord
ingly the intervention of Beatrice was needed,
— of Beatrice, as Miss Rossetti admirably well
expresses it, " already transfigured, potent not
only now to charm and soothe, potent to rule ;
to the Intellect a light, to the Affections a com
pass and a balance, a sceptre over the Will."

The wood obscure in which Dante finds him
self is the world.1 The three beasts who dispute
his way are the sins that most easily beset us,
Pride, the Lusts of the Flesh, and Greed. We
are surprised that Miss Rossetti should so local-
go to Paris, the great fountain of such learning, after his ban
ishment. Boccaccio indeed says that he did not return to Italy
till 1311. Wegele (Dante's Leben und Werke, p. 85) puts
the date of his journey between 1292 and 1297. Ozanam,
with a pathos comically touching to the academic soul, laments
that poverty compelled him to leave the university without the
degree he had so justly earned. He consoles himself with the
thought that "there remained to him an incontestable erudi
tion and the love of serious studies." (Dante et la philosophic
catholique, p. 112.) It is sad that we cannot write Dante s
Alighierius, S. 7". D. ! Dante seems to imply that he began
to devote himself to Philosophy and Theology shortly after
Beatrice's death. (Convito, tratt. n. c. 13.) He compares
himself to one who, " seeking silver, should, without mean
ing it, find gold, which an occult cause presents to him, not
perhaps without the divine command. ' ' Here again apparently
is an allusion to his having found Wisdom while he sought
Learning. He had thought to find God in the beauty of his
works, he learned to seek all things in God.

1 In a more general view, matter, the domain of the senses,
no doubt with a recollection of Aristotle's v\r].

i24 DANTE

ize and confine Dante's meaning as to explain
them by Florence, France, and Rome. Had he
written in so narrow a sense as this, it would in
deed be hard to account for the persistent power
of his poem. But it was no political pamphlet
that Dante was writing. Subjectum est Homo,
and it only takes the form of a diary by Dante
Alighieri because of the intense realism of his
imagination, a realism as striking in the " Para-
diso " as the " Inferno," though it takes a dif
ferent shape. Everything, the most supersen-
sual, presented itself to his mind, not as abstract
idea, but as visible type. As men could once
embody a quality of good in a saint and see it,
as they even now in moments of heightened
fantasy or enthusiasm can personify their coun
try and speak of England, France, or America,
as if they were real beings, so did Dante habit
ually.1 He saw all his thoughts as distinctly as
the hypochondriac sees his black dog, and, as
in that, their form and color were but the out
ward form of an inward and spiritual condition.
Whatever subsidiary interpretations the poem is
capable of, its great and primary value is as the
autobiography of a human soul, of yours and
mine, it may be, as well as Dante's. In that lie
its profound meaning and its permanent force.

1 As we have seen, even a sigh becomes He. This makes
one of the difficulties of translating his minor poems. The
modern mind is incapable of this subtlety.

DANTE 125

That an exile, a proud man forced to be de
pendent, should have found some consolation
in brooding over the justice of God, weighed in
such different scales from those of man, in con
trasting the outward prosperity of the sinner
with the awful spiritual ruin within, is not won
derful, nay, we can conceive of his sometimes
finding the wrath of God sweeter than his mercy.
But it is wonderful that out of the very wreck
of his own life he should have built this three-
arched bridge, still firm against the wash and
wear of ages, stretching from the Pit to the
Empyrean, by which men may pass from a
doubt of God's providence to a certainty of his
long-suffering and loving-kindness.

" The Infinite Goodness hath such ample arms
That it receives whatever turns to it." x

A tear is enough to secure the saving clasp of
them.2 It cannot be too often repeated that
Dante's Other World is not in its first concep
tion a place of departed spirits. It is the Spirit
ual World, whereof we become denizens by
birth and citizens by adoption. It is true that
for artistic purposes he makes it conform so far
as possible with vulgar preconceptions, but he
himself has told us again and again what his real
meaning was. Virgil tells Dante, —
" Thou shalt behold the people dolorous
Who have foregone the good of intellect." 3

1 Purgatorio, in. 122, 123. 2 Ibid. v. 107.

3 Inferno y m. 17, 1 8 (hanno perduto — thrown away).

126 DANTE

The " good of the intellect," Dante tells us after
Aristotle, is Truth.1 He says that Virgil has led
him " through the deep night of the truly dead:' 2
Who are they ? Dante had in mind the saying
of the Apostle, " to be carnally minded is death."
He says : "In man to live is to use reason.
Then if living is the being of man, to depart
from that use is to depart from being, and so
to be dead. And doth not he depart from the
use of reason who doth not reason out the
object of his life ? " "I say that so vile a person
is dead, seeming to be alive. For we must know
that the wicked man may be called truly dead."
" He is dead who follows not the teacher. And
of such a one some might say, how is he dead
and yet goes about ? I answer that the man is
dead and the beast remains." 3 Accordingly he
has put living persons in the " Inferno," like
Frate Alberigo and Branca d' Oria, of whom he
says with bitter sarcasm that he still " eats and
drinks and puts on clothes," as if that were his
highest ideal of the true ends of life.4 There is
a passage in the first canto of the " Inferno " 5
which has been variously interpreted : —

" The ancient spirits disconsolate
Who cry out each one for the second death."

Miss Rossetti cites it as an example of what

1 Convito, tratt. n. c. 14. * Purgatorio, xxm. 121, 122.
3 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 7. 4 Inferno, xxxm. 1 18, et seq.
s Inferno, i. 116, 117.

DANTE 127

she felicitously calls " an ambiguity, not hazy,
but prismatic, and therefore not really perplex
ing." She gives us accordingly our choice of
two interpretations : " ( Each cries out on ac
count of the second death which he is suffering,'
and c Each cries out for death to come a sec
ond time and ease him of his sufferings/ " *
Buti says : " Here one doubts what the author
meant by the second death, and as for me I
think he meant the last damnation, which shall
be at the day of judgment, because they
would wish through envy that it had already
come, that they might have more companions,
since the first death is the first damnation, when
the soul parted from the body is condemned to
the pains of hell for its sins. The second is
when, resuscitated at the judgment day, they
shall be finally condemned, soul and body to
gether. ... It may otherwise be understood as
annihilation." Imola says, " Each would wish
to die again, if he could, to put an end to his
pain. Do not hold with some who think that
Dante calls the second death the day of judg
ment," and then quotes a passage from St.
Augustine which favors that view. Pietro di
Dante gives us four interpretations among which
to choose, the first being that, " allegorically,

1 Mr. Longfellow's for, like the Italian per, gives us the
same privilege of election. We " freeze for cold," we " hun
ger for food."

iz8 DANTE

depraved and vicious men are in a certain sense
dead in reputation, and this is the first death;
the second is that of the body." This we be
lieve to be the true meaning. Dante himself,
in a letter to the " most rascally (scelestissimis]
dwellers in Florence," gives us the key : " but
you, transgressors of the laws of God and man,
whom the direful maw of cupidity hath enticed
not unwilling to every crime, does not the
terror of the second death torment you ? " Their
first death was in their sins, the second is what
they may expect from the just vengeance of the
Emperor Henry VII. The world Dante leads
us through is that of his own thought, and it
need not surprise us therefore if we meet in it
purely imaginary beings like Tristrem1 and Re-
noard of the club.2 His personality is so strongly
marked that it is nothing more than natural
that his poem should be interpreted as if only
he and his opinions, prejudices, or passions were
concerned. He would not have been the great
poet he was if he had not felt intensely and
humanly, but he could never have won the

1 Inferno , v. 67.

2 Paradiso, xvm. 46. Renoard is one of the heroes (a
rudely humorous one) in La Bataille cT Alischans, an episode
of the measureless Guillaume d"1 Orange. It was from the
graves of those supposed to have been killed in this battle that
Dante draws a comparison (Inferno, ix. ). Boccaccio's com
ment on this passage might have been read to advantage by
the French editors of Alischam.

DANTE 129

cosmopolitan place he holds had he not known
how to generalize his special experience into
something mediatorial for all of us. Pietro di
Dante in his comment on the thirty-first canto
of the " Purgatorio " says that " unless you
understand him and his figures allegorically,
you will be deceived by the bark," and adds
that our author made his pilgrimage as the re
presentative of the rest (in persona ceterorum).1
To give his vision reality, he has adapted it to
the vulgar mythology, but to understand it as the
author meant, it must be taken in the larger
sense. To confine it to Florence or to Italy is
to banish it from the sympathies of mankind.
It was not from the campanile of the Badia that
Dante got his views of life and man.

The relation of Dante to literature is monu
mental, and marks the era at which the modern
begins. He is not only the first great poet, but
the first great prose-writer who used a language

1 We cite this comment under its received name, though
it is uncertain if Pietro was the author of it. Indeed, we
strongly doubt it. It is at least one of the earliest, for it ap
pears, by the comment on Paradiso, xxvi., that the greater
part of it was written before 1341. It is remarkable for the
strictness with which it holds to the spiritual interpretation of
the poem, and deserves much more to be called Ottimo, than
the comment which goes by that name. Its publication is due
to the zeal and liberality of the late Lord Vernon, to whom
students of Dante are also indebted for the parallel-text reprint
of the four earliest editions of the Commedia.

130 DANTE

not yet subdued to literature, who used it more
over for scientific and metaphysical discussion,
thus giving an incalculable impulse to the cul
ture of his countrymen by making the laity
free of what had hitherto been the exclusive
guild of clerks.1 Whatever poetry had preceded
him, whether in the Romance or Teutonic
tongues, is interesting mainly for its simplicity
without forethought, or, as in the " Nibelungen,"
for a kind of savage grandeur that rouses the
sympathy of whatever of the natural man is
dormant in us. But it shows no trace of the
creative faculty either in unity of purpose or
style, the proper characteristics of literature. If
it have the charm of wanting artifice, it has
not the higher charm of art. We are in the
realm of chaos and chance, nebular, with phos
phorescent gleams here and there, star-stuff,
but uncondensed in stars. The " Nibelungen"
is not without far-reaching hints and forebodings
of something finer than we find in it, but they
are a glamour from the vague darkness which

1 See Wegele, ubi supra, p. 174, et seq. The best
analysis of Dante's opinions we have ever met with is Emil
Ruth's Studien uber Dante Alighieri, Tubingen, 1853.
Unhappily it wants an index, and accordingly loses a great
part of its usefulness for those not already familiar with the
subject. Nor are its references sufficiently exact. We al
ways respect Dr. Ruth's opinions, if we do not wholly ac
cept them, for they are all the results of original and assiduous
study.

DANTE 131

encircles it, like the whisper of the sea upon
an unknown shore at night, powerful only over
the more vulgar side of the imagination, and
leaving no thought, scarce even any image (at
least of beauty) behind them. Such poems are
the amours, not the lasting friendships and pos
sessions of the mind. They thrill and cannot
satisfy.

But Dante is not merely the founder of mod
ern literature. He would have been that if he
had never written anything more than his " Can-
zoni," which for elegance, variety of rhythm, and
fervor of sentiment were something altogether
new. They are of a higher mood than any other
poems of the same style in their own language,
or indeed in any other. In beauty of phrase and
subtlety of analogy they remind one of some of
the Greek tragic choruses. We are constantly
moved in them by a nobleness of tone, whose
absence in many admired lyrics of the kind is
poorly supplied by conceits. So perfect is
Dante's mastery of his material, that in com
positions, as he himself has shown, so artificial,1

1 See the second book of the De Vulgari Eloquio. The
only other Italian poet who reminds us of Dante in sustained
dignity is Guido Guinicelli. Dante esteemed him highly, calls
him maximus in the De Vulgari Eloquio, and " the father of
me and of my betters," in Purgatorio, xxvi. See some ex
cellent specimens of him in Mr. D. G. Rossetti's remarkable
volume of translations from the early Italian poets. Mr. Ros-
setti would do a real and lasting service to literature by em-

1 32 DANTE

the form seems rather organic than mechanical,
which cannot be said of the best of the Prove^al
poets who led the way in this kind. Dante's
sonnets also have a grace and tenderness which
have been seldom matched. His lyrical excel
lence would have got him into the Collections,
and he would have made here and there an en
thusiast as Donne does in English, but his great
claim to remembrance is not merely Italian. It
is that he was the first Christian poet, in any
proper sense of the word, the first who so sub
dued dogma to the uses of plastic imagination as
to make something that is still poetry of the
highest order after it has suffered the disen
chantment inevitable in the most perfect trans
lation. Verses of the kind usually called sacred
(reminding one of the adjective's double mean
ing) had been written before his time in the
vulgar tongue, such verses as remain inviolably
sacred in the volumes of specimens, looked at
with distant reverence by the pious, and with
far other feelings by the profane reader. There
were cycles of poems in which the physical con
flict between Christianity and Paganism 1 fur
nished the subject, but in which the theological
views of the authors, whether doctrinal or his-

ploying his singular gift in putting Dante's minor poems into
English.

1 The old French poems confound all unbelievers together
as pagans and worshippers of idols.

DANTE 133

torical, could hardly be reconciled with any sys
tem of religion ancient or modern. There were
Church legends of saints and martyrs versified,
fit certainly to make any other form of martyr
dom seem amiable to those who heard them, and
to suggest palliative thoughts about Diocletian.
Finally, there were the romances of Arthur and
his knights, which later, by means of allegory,
contrived to be both entertaining and edifying ;
every one who listened to them paying the min
strel his money, and having his choice whether
he would take them as song or sermon. In the
heroes of some of these certain Christian virtues
were typified, and around a few of them, as the
Holy Grail, a perfume yet lingers of cloistered
piety and withdrawal. Wolfram von Eschen-
bach, indeed, has divided his " Parzival " into
three books, of Simplicity, Doubt, and Healing,
which has led Gervinus to trace a not altogether
fanciful analogy between that poem and the
" Divina Commedia." The doughty old poet,
who says of himself, —

" Of song I have some slight control,
But deem her of a feeble soul
That doth not love my naked sword
Above my sweetest lyric word," —

tells us that his subject is the choice between
good and evil ; —

" Whose soul takes Untruth for its bride
And sets himself on Evil's side,

134 DANTE

Chooses the Black, and sure it is
His path leads down to the abyss;
But he who doth his nature feed
With steadfastness and loyal deed
Lies open to the heavenly light
And takes his portion with the White."

But Wolfram's poem has no system, and shows
good feeling rather than settled conviction.
Above all it is wandering (as he himself con
fesses), and altogether wants any controlling
purpose. But to whatever extent Christianity
had insinuated itself into and colored European
literature, it was mainly as mythology. The
Christian idea had never yet incorporated itself.
It was to make its avatar in Dante. To under
stand fully what he accomplished we must form
some conception of what is meant by the Chris
tian idea. To bring it into fuller relief, let us
contrast it with the Greek idea as it appears in
poetry ; for we are not dealing with a question
of theology so much as with one of aesthetics.

Greek art at its highest point is doubtless
the most perfect that we know. But its circle of
motives was essentially limited ; and the Greek
drama in its passion, its pathos, and its humor
is primarily Greek, and secondarily human. Its
tragedy chooses its actors from certain heroic
families, and finds its springs of pity and terror
in physical suffering and worldly misfortune.
Its best examples, like the " Antigone," illus-

DANTE 135

trate a single duty, or, like the " Hippolytus,"
a single passion, on which, as on a pivot, the
chief character, statuesquely simple in its de
tails, revolves as pieces of sculpture are some
times made to do, displaying its different sides
in one invariable light. The general impression
left on the mind (and this is apt to be a truer
one than any drawn from single examples) is
that the duty is one which is owed to custom,
that the passion leads to a breach of some con
vention settled by common consent,1 and accord
ingly it is an outraged society whose figure looms
in the background, rather than an offended God.
At most it was one god of many, and meanwhile
another might be friendly. In the Greek epic,
the gods are partisans, they hold caucuses, they
lobby and log-roll for their candidates. The tacit
admission of a revealed code of morals wrought
a great change. The complexity and range of
passion is vastly increased when the offence is at
once both crime and sin, a wrong done against
order and against conscience at the same time.
The relation of the Greek tragedy to the higher
powers is chiefly antagonistic, struggle against
an implacable destiny, sublime struggle, and of
heroes, but sure of defeat at last. And that defeat

1 Dante is an ancient in this respect as in many others, but
the difference is that with him society is something divinely
ordained. He follows Aristotle pretty closely, but on his own
theory crime and sin are identical.

136 DANTE

is final. Grand figures are those it exhibits to
us, in some respects unequalled, and in their
severe simplicity they compare with modern
poetry as sculpture with painting. Considered
merely as works of art, these products of the
Greek imagination satisfy our highest concep
tion of form. They suggest inevitably a feeling
of perfect completeness, isolation, and inde
pendence, of something rounded and finished
in itself. The secret of those old sharpers died
with them ; their wand is broken, their book
sunk deeper than ever plummet sounded. The
type of their work is the Greek temple, which
leaves nothing to hope for in unity and perfec
tion of design, in harmony and subordination
of parts, and in entireness of impression. But
in this aesthetic completeness it ends. It rests
solidly and complacently on the earth, and the
mind rests there with it.

Now the Christian idea has to do with the
human soul, which Christianity may be almost
said to have invented. While all Paganism re
presents a few preeminent families, the founders
of dynasties or ancestors of races, as of kin with
the gods, Christianity makes every pedigree end
in Deity, makes monarch and slave the chil
dren of one God. Its heroes struggle not
against, but upward and onward toward, the
higher powers who are always on their side.
Its highest conception of beauty is not aesthetic,

DANTE 137

but moral. With it prosperity and adversity
have exchanged meanings. It finds enemies in
those worldly good fortunes where Pagan and
even Hebrew literature saw the highest blessing,
and invincible allies in sorrow, poverty, humble
ness of station, where the former world recog
nized only implacable foes. While it utterly
abolished all boundary lines of race or country
and made mankind unitary, its hero is always
the individual man whoever and wherever he
may be. Above all, an entirely new conception
of the Infinite and of man's relation to it came
in with Christianity. That, and not the finite, is
always the background, consciously or not. It
changed the scene of the last act of every drama
to the next world. Endless aspiration of all the
faculties became thus the ideal of Christian life,
and to express it more or less perfectly the ideal
of essentially Christian art. It was this which
the Middle Ages instinctively typified in the
Gothic cathedral, — no accidental growth, but
the visible symbol of an inward faith, — which
soars forever upward, and yearns toward heaven
like a martyr-flame suddenly turned to stone.

It is not without significance that Goethe,
who, like Dante, also absorbed and represented
the tendency and spirit of his age, should, during
his youth and while Europe was alive with the
moral and intellectual longing which preluded
the French Revolution, have loved the Gothic

138 DANTE

architecture. It is no less significant that in the
period of reaction toward more positive thought
which followed, he should have preferred the
Greek. His greatest poem, conceived during
the former era, is Gothic. Dante, endeavoring
to conform himself to literary tradition, began
to write the " Divina Commedia " in Latin, and
had elaborated several cantos of it in that dead
and intractable material. But that poetic instinct,
which is never the instinct of an individual, but
of his age, could not so be satisfied, and leaving
the classic structure he had begun to stand as a
monument of failure, he completed his work
in Italian. Instead of endeavoring to manu
facture a great poem out of what was foreign and
artificial, he let the poem make itself out of him.
The epic which he wished to write in the univer
sal language of scholars, and which might have
had its ten lines in the history of literature, would
sing itself in provincial Tuscan, and turns out
to be written in the universal dialect of mankind.
Thus all great poets have been in a certain
sense provincial, — Homer, Dante, Shakespeare,
Goethe, Burns, Scott in the " Heart of Midlo
thian" and " Bride of Lammermoor," — because
the office of the poet is always vicarious, because
nothing that has not been living experience can
become living expression, because the collective
thought, the faith, the desire of a nation or a
race, is the cumulative result of many ages, is

DANTE 139

something organic, and is wiser and stronger
than any single person, and will make a great
statesman or a great poet out of any man who
can entirely surrender himself to it.

As the Gothic cathedral, then, is the type of
the Christian idea, so is it also of Dante's poem.
And as that in its artistic unity is but the com
pleted thought of a single architect, which yet
could never have been realized except out of the
faith and by the contributions of an entire people,
whose beliefs and superstitions, whose imagina
tion and fancy, find expression in its statues and
its carvings, its calm saints and martyrs now at
rest forever in the seclusion of their canopied
niches, and its wanton grotesques thrusting them
selves forth from every pinnacle and gargoyle,
so in Dante's poem, while it is as personal and
peculiar as if it were his private journal and auto
biography, we can yet read the diary and the
autobiography of the thirteenth century and of
the Italian people. Complete and harmonious
in design as his work is, it is yet no Pagan
temple enshrining a type of the human made
divine by triumph of corporeal beauty; it is not
a private chapel housing a single saint and dedi
cate to one chosen bloom of Christian piety or
devotion ; it is truly a cathedral, over whose high
altar hangs the emblem of suffering, of the Di
vine made human to teach the beauty of adver
sity, the eternal presence of the spiritual, not

HO DANTE

overhanging and threatening, but informing and
sustaining the material. In this cathedral of
Dante's there are side chapels as is fit, with altars
to all Christian virtues and perfections ; but the
great impression of its leading thought is that of
aspiration, for ever and ever. In the three divi
sions of the poem we may trace something more
than a fancied analogy with a Christian basilica.
There is first the ethnic forecourt, then the pur
gatorial middle space, and last the holy of holies
dedicated to the eternal presence of the media
torial God.

But what gives Dante's poem a peculiar claim
to the title of the first Christian poem is not
merely its doctrinal truth or its Christian
mythology, but the fact that the scene of it is
laid, not in this world, but in the soul of man ;
that it is the allegory of a human life, and there
fore universal in its significance and its applica
tion. The genius of Dante has given to it such a
self-subsistent reality, that one almost gets to
feel as if the chief value of contemporary Italian
history had been to furnish it with explanatory
footnotes, and the age in which it was written
assumes towards it the place of a satellite. For
Italy, Dante is the thirteenth century.

Most men make the voyage of life as if they
carried sealed orders which they were not to open
till they were fairly in mid-ocean. But Dante
had made up his mind as to the true purpose

DANTE 141

and meaning of our existence in this world
shortly after he had passed his twenty-fifth year.
He had already conceived the system about
which as a connecting thread the whole experi
ence of his life, the whole result of his studies,
was to cluster in imperishable crystals. The
corner-stone of his system was the Freedom of
the Will (in other words, the right of private
judgment with the condition of accountability),
which Beatrice calls the " noble virtue." x As to
every man is offered his choice between good
and evil, and as, even upon the root of a nature
originally evil a habit of virtue may be engrafted,2
no man is excused. " All hope abandon ye
who enter in," for they have thrown away reason
which is the good of the intellect, " and it seems
to me no less a marvel to bring back to reason
him in whom it is wholly spent than to bring
back to life him who has been four days in the
tomb." 3 As a guide of the will in civil affairs

1 PurgatoriQy xvm. 7 3 . He defines it in the De Monarchia
(lib. i. sec. 14). Among other things he calls it "the first
beginning of our liberty." In Paradiso, v. 19, 20, he calls it
"the greatest gift that in his largess God creating made."
*' Dico quod judicium medium est apprehensionis et appetitus. "
( De Monarchia, ubi supra. )

" Right and wrong,
Between whose endless jar justice resides."

(Troilui and Cressida.)

* Convito, tratt. iv. c. 22.

3 Ibid, tratt. iv. c. 7. «« Qui descenderit ad inferos, HOD
ascendet." (Job vii. 9.)

1 42 DANTE

the Emperor ; in spiritual, the Pope.1 Dante
is not one of those reformers who would assume
the office of God to " make all things new." He
knew the power of tradition and habit, and
wished to utilize it for his purpose. He found
the Empire and the Papacy already existing, but
both needing reformation that they might serve
the ends of their original institution. Bad leader
ship was to blame ; men fit to gird on the sword
had been turned into priests, and good preach
ers spoiled to make bad kings.2 The spiritual
had usurped to itself the prerogatives of the
temporal power.

" Rome, that reformed the world, accustomed was

Two suns to have which one road and the other,
Of God and of the world, made manifest.
One has the other quenched, and to the crosier
The sword is joined, and ill beseemeth it,

Because, being joined one feareth not the other. " 3

Both powers held their authority directly from
God, " not so, however, that the Roman Prince
is not in some things subject to the Roman
Pontiff, since that human felicity [to be attained

1 But it may be inferred that he put the interests of man
kind above both. "For citizens," he says, "exist not for
the sake of consuls, nor the people for the sake of the king,
but, on the contrary, consuls for the sake of citizens, and the
king for the sake of the people."

3 Paradiso, vm. 145, 146.

3 Pur gator to, xvi. 106, 112.

DANTE H3

only by peace, justice, and good government,
possible only under a single ruler] is in some
sort ordained to the end of immortal felicity.
Let Caesar use that reverence toward Peter
which a first-born son ought to use toward a
father ; that, shone upon by the light of paternal
grace, he may more powerfully illumine the orb
of earth over which he is set by him alone who
is the ruler of all things spiritual and tempo
ral/'1 As to the fatal gift of Constantine, Dante
demonstrates that an Emperor could not alienate
what he held only in trust ; but if he made the
gift, the Pope should hold it as a feudatory of
the Empire, for the benefit, however, of Christ's
poor.2 Dante is always careful to distinguish
between the Papacy and the Pope. He pro
phesies for Boniface VIII. a place in hell,3 but
acknowledges him as the Vicar of Christ, goes so
far even as to denounce the outrage of Guillaume

1 De Monarchic, sec. ult.

3 Ibid. lib. m. sec. 10. " Poterat tamen Imperator in
patrocinium Ecclesiae patrimonium et alia deputare immoto
semper superior! dominio cujus unitas divisionem non patitur.
Poterat et Vicarius Dei recipere, non tanquam possessor, sed
tanquam fructuum pro Ecclesia proque Christi pauperibus
dispensator. " He tells us that St. Dominic did not ask for
the tithes which belong to the poor of God. (Paradiso,
xn. 93, 94.) "Let them return whence they came," he
says (De Monarchia, lib. n. sec. 12); "they came well, let
them return ill, for they were well given and ill held."

3 Inferno, xix. 53; Paradiso, xxx. 145-148.

1 44 DANTE

de Nogaret at Anagni as done to the Saviour
himself.1 But in the Spiritual World Dante
acknowledges no such supremacy, and, when he
would have fallen on his knees before Adrian V.,
is rebuked by him in a quotation from the Apo
calypse : —

" Err not, fellow servant am I
With thee and with the others to one power." 2

So impartial was this man whose great work is
so often represented as a kind of bag in which
he secreted the gall of personal prejudice, so
truly Catholic is he, that both parties find their
arsenal in him. The Romanist proves his sound
ness in doctrine, the anti-Romanist claims him
as the first Protestant ; the Mazzinist and the
Imperialist can alike quote him for their pur
pose. Dante's ardent conviction would not let
him see that both Church and Empire were on
the wane. If an ugly suspicion of this would
force itself upon him, perhaps he only clung
to both the more tenaciously ; but he was no
blind theorist. He would reform the Church
through the Church, and is less anxious for
Italian independence than for Italian good
government under an Emperor from Germany
rather than from Utopia.

The Papacy was a necessary part of Dante's
system, as a supplement to the Empire, which we
strongly incline to believe was always foremost
1 Purgatorioy xx. 86-92. 2 Ibid. xix. 134, 135.

DANTE H5

in his mind. In a passage already quoted, he
says that " the soil where Rome sits is worthy
beyond what men preach and admit," that is,
as the birthplace of the Empire. Both in the
"Convito" and the " De Monarchia" he af
firms that the course of Roman history was pro
videntially guided from the first. Rome was
founded in the same year that brought into the
world David, ancestor of the Redeemer after the
flesh. St. Augustine said that " God showed
in the most opulent and illustrious Empire of
the Romans how much the civil virtues might
avail even without true religion, that it might
be understood how, this added, men became
citizens of another city whose king is truth,
whose law charity, and whose measure eternity. "
Dante goes further than this. He makes the
Romans as well as the Jews a chosen people,
the one as founders of civil society, the other
as depositaries of the true faith.1 One side of
Dante's mind was so practical and positive, and
his pride in the Romans so intense,2 that he

1 This results from the whole course of his argument in the
second book of De Monarchia, and in Paradiso, vi., he calls
the Roman eagle "the bird of God " and "the scutcheon
of God. " We must remember that with Dante God is always
the "Emperor of Heaven," the barons of whose court are
the Apostles. (Paradiso, xxiv. 115; ibid. xxv. 17.)

* Dante seems to imply (though his name be German)
that he was of Roman descent. He makes the original inhab
itants of Florence (Inferno, xv. 77, 78) of Roman seed; and

146 DANTE

sometimes seems to regard their mission as the
higher of the two. Without peace, which only
good government could give, mankind could
not arrive at the highest virtue, whether of
the active or contemplative life. " And since
what is true of the part is true of the whole, and
it happens in the particular man that by sitting
quietly he is perfected in prudence and wisdom,
it is clear that the human race in the quiet or
tranquillity of peace is most freely and easily
disposed for its proper work which is almost
divine, as it is written, ( Thou hast made him
a little lower than the angels.' x Whence it is
manifest that universal peace is the best of those
things which are ordained for our beatitude.
Hence it is that not riches, not pleasures, not
honors, not length of life, not health, not
strength, not comeliness, was sung to the shep
herds from on high, but peace." 2 It was Dante's
experience of the confusion of Italy, where

" One doth gnaw the other
Of those whom one wall and one fosse shut in," 3

Cacciaguida, when asked by him about his ancestry, makes
no more definite answer than that their dwelling was in the
most ancient part of the city. (Paradiso, xvi. 40.)

1 Man was created, according to Dante ( Convito, tratt. n.
c. 6), to supply the place of the fallen angels, and is in a
sense superior to the angels, inasmuch as he has reason, which
they do not need.

2 De Monarchia, lib. i. sec. 5.

3 Pur gator iot vi. 83, 84.

DANTE 147

that suggested the thought of a universal um
pire, for that, after all, was to be the chief func
tion of his Emperor. He was too wise to insist
on a uniformity of political institutions a priori,*
for he seems to have divined that the surest stay
of order, as of practical wisdom, is habit, which
is a growth, and cannot be made off-hand. He
believed with Aristotle that vigorous minds were
intended by Nature to rule,2 and that certain
races, like certain men, are born to leadership.3
He calls democracies, oligarchies, and petty
princedoms (tyrannides) " oblique policies which
drive the human race to slavery, as is patent in
all of them to one who reasons."4 He has no
thing but pity for mankind when it has become
a many-headed beast, " despising the higher in
tellect irrefragable in reason, the lower which
hath the face of experience." 5 He had no faith
in a turbulent equality asserting the divine right
of I'm as good as you. He thought it fatal to all
discipline : " The confounding of persons hath
ever been the beginning of sickness in the state."6
It is the same thought which Shakespeare puts
in the mouth of Ulysses : —

" Degree being vizarded,
The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask.
• • • When degree is shaked,

1 De Monarchia, lib. i. sec. 16. 2 Ibid. lib. i. sec. 5.
3 Ibid. lib. ii. sec. 7. 4 Ibid. lib. i. sec. 14.

5 Ibid. lib. i. sec. 18. 6 Paradiso, xvi. 67, 68.

148 DANTE

Which is the ladder to all high designs,
Then enterprise is sick." *

Yet no one can read Dante without feeling that
he had a high sense of the worth of freedom,
whether in thought or government. He repre
sents, indeed, the very object of his journey
through the triple realm of shades as a search
after liberty.2 But it must not be that scramble
after undefined and indefinable rights which
ends always in despotism, equally degrading
whether crowned with a red cap or an imperial
diadem. His theory of liberty has for its corner
stone the Freedom of the Will, and the will is
free only when the judgment wholly controls
the appetite.3 On such a base even a democracy
may rest secure, and on such alone.

Rome was always the central point of Dante's
speculation. A shadow of her old sovereignty
was still left her in the primacy of the Church,
to which unity of faith was essential. He accord
ingly has no sympathy with heretics of what
ever kind. He puts the ex-troubadour Bishop
of Marseilles, chief instigator of the horrors of
Provence, in paradise.4 The Church is infallible
in spiritual matters, but this is an affair of out
ward discipline merely, and means the Church

1 Troilus and Cressida, Act i. Sc. 3. The whole speech is
very remarkable both in thought and phrase.

2 PurgatoriOy i. 71.

3 De Monarchia, lib. i. sec. 14. 4 Paradiso, ix.

DANTE 149

as a form of polity. Unity was Dante's leading
doctrine, and therefore he puts Mahomet among
the schismatics, not because he divided the
Church, but the faith.1 Dante's Church was of
this world, but he surely believed in another and
spiritual one. It has been questioned whether
he was orthodox or not. There can be no doubt
of it so far as outward assent and conformity are
concerned, which he would practise himself and
enforce upon others as the first postulate of
order, the prerequisite for all happiness in this
life. In regard to the Visible Church he was a
reformer, but no revolutionist ; it is sheer igno
rance to speak of him as if there were anything
new or exceptional in his denunciation of the
corruptions of the clergy. They were the com
monplaces of the age, nor were they confined
to laymen.2 To the absolute authority of the
Church Dante admitted some exceptions. He
denies that the supreme Pontiff has the unlimited
power of binding and loosing claimed for him.
" Otherwise he might absolve me impenitent,
which God himself could not do."3

" By malison of theirs is not so lost
Eternal Love that it cannot return." 4

1 Inferno, xxvm. ; Purgatorio, xxxn.

2 See the poems of Walter Mapes (who was Archdeacon
of Oxford); the Bible Guiot, and the Bible au seignor de
Berze, Barbazan and Meon, n.

3 De Monarchia, lib. m. sec. 8.
* Purgatorioy in. 133, 134.

i5o DANTE

Nor does the sacredness of the office extend to
him who chances to hold it. Philip the Fair
himself could hardly treat Boniface VIII. worse
than he. With wonderful audacity, he declares
the papal throne vacant by the mouth of St.
Peter himself.1 Even if his theory of a dual
government were not in question, Dante must
have been very cautious in meddling with the
Church. It was not an age that stood much
upon ceremony. He himself tells us he had
seen men burned alive, and the author of the
" Ottimo Comento " says : " I the writer saw
followers of his [Fra Dolcino] burned at Padua
to the number of twenty-two together." 2 Clearly,
in such a time as this, one must not make " the
veil of the mysterious verse " too thin.3

In the affairs of this life Dante was, as we
have said, supremely practical, and he makes
prudence the chief of the cardinal virtues.4 He
has made up his mind to take things as they
come, and to do at Rome as the Romans
do.

"Ah, savage company! but in the Church
With saints, and in the tavern with the gluttons I" s

In the world of thought it was otherwise, and

1 Paradiso, xxvu. 22.

3 Purgatorio, xxvu. 18; Ottimo ', Inferno <, xxvm. 55.

3 Inferno, ix. 63; Purgatorio, vm. 20.

* Purgatorio , xxix. 131, 132.

s Inferno, xxn. 13, 14.

DANTE 151

here Dante's doctrine, if not precisely esoteric,
was certainly not that of his day, and must be
gathered from hints rather than direct state
ments. The general notion of God was still
(perhaps is largely even now) of a provincial,
one might almost say a denominational, Deity.
The popular poets always represent Macon,
Apolin, Tervagant, and the rest as quasi-deities
unable to resist the superior strength of the
Christian God. The Paynim answers the argu
ments of his would-be converters with the taunt
that he would never worship a divinity who
could not save himself from being done igno-
miniously to death. Dante evidently was not
satisfied with the narrow conception which lim
its the interest of the Deity to the affairs of
Jews and Christians. That saying of St. Paul,
" Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him
declare I unto you," had perhaps influenced him,
but his belief in the divine mission of the Ro
man people probably was conclusive. " The
Roman Empire had the help of miracles in
perfecting itself," he says, and then enumerates
some of them. The first is that " under Numa
Pompilius, the second king of the Romans,
when he was sacrificing according to the rite of
the Gentiles, a shield fell from heaven into the
city chosen of God."1 In the " Convito " we
find " Virgil speaking in the person of God,"
1 De Monarchia, lib. u. sec. 4.

152 DANTE

and .ZEacus "wisely having recourse to God,"
the god being Jupiter.1 Ephialtes is punished
in hell for rebellion against "the Supreme
Jove," 2 and, that there may be no misunder
standing, Dante elsewhere invokes the

"Jove Supreme,
Who upon earth for us wast crucified." 3

It is noticeable also that Dante, with evident de
sign, constantly alternates examples drawn from
Christian and Pagan tradition or mythology.4
He had conceived a unity in the human race, all
of whose branches had worshipped the same God
under divers names and aspects, and had arrived
at the same truth by different roads. We cannot
understand a passage in the twenty -sixth " Para-
diso," where Dante inquires of Adam concern
ing the names of God, except as a hint that
the Chosen People had done in this thing even
as the Gentiles did.5 It is true that he puts all

1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 4; ibid. c. 27; jEneid, i. 178,
179; Ovid's Metamorphoses, vn.

2 Inferno, xxxi. 92.

3 PurgatortOy vi. 1 1 8, 119. Pulci, not understanding, has
parodied this. {Morgante, canto n. st. I.)

4 See, for example, Purgatorio, xx. 100-117.

s We believe that Dante, though he did not understand
Greek, knew something of Hebrew. He would have been
likely to study it as the sacred language, and opportunities of
profiting by the help of learned Jews could not have been want
ing to him in his wanderings. In the above-cited passage some
of the best texts read I s'appellava, and others Un s' appellava.

DANTE 153

Pagans in Limbo, " where without hope they
live in longing," and that he makes baptism
essential to salvation.1 But it is noticeable that
his Limbo is the Elysium of Virgil, and that he
particularizes Adam, Noah, Moses, Abraham,
David, and others as prisoners there with the rest
till the descent of Christ into hell.2 But were
they altogether without hope ? and did baptism
mean an immersion of the body or a purification
of the soul ? The state of the heathen after death
had evidently been to Dante one of those doubts
that spring up at the foot of every truth. In the
" De Monarchia" he says: "There are some
judgments of God to which, though human rea
son cannot attain by its own strength, yet is it
lifted to them by the help of faith and of those
things which are said to us in Holy Writ, — as
to this, that no one, however perfect in the moral
and intellectual virtues both as a habit [of the
mind] and in practice, can be saved without
faith, it being granted that he shall never have
heard anything concerning Christ ; for the un
aided reason of man cannot look upon this as
just ; nevertheless, with the help of faith, it

God was called / (the Je in Jehovah) or One, and afterwards
Ely — the strong, — an epithet given to many gods. Which
ever reading we adopt, the meaning and the inference from it
are the same.

1 Inferno, iv.

2 Dante's "Limbo," of course, is the older " Limbus
Patrum."

i54 DANTE

can." ' But faith, it should seem, was long in
lifting Dante to this height; for in the nineteenth
canto of the " Paradiso," which must have been
written many years after the passage just cited,
the doubt recurs again, and we are told that it
was " a cavern," concerning which he had " made
frequent questioning." The answer is given
here : —

" Truly to him who with me subtilizes,

If so the Scripture were not over you,

For doubting there were marvellous occasion."

But what Scripture ? Dante seems cautious, tells
us that the eternal judgments are above our com
prehension, postpones the answer, and when it
comes, puts an orthodox prophylactic before

it: —

" Unto this kingdom never
Ascended one who had not faith in Christ,
Before or since he to the tree was nailed.
But look thou, many crying are, ' Christ, Christ ! '
Who at the judgment shall be far less near
To him than some shall be who knew not Christ. ' '

There is, then, some hope for the man born on
the bank of Indus who has never heard of
Christ ? Dante is still cautious, but answers the
question indirectly in the next canto by putting
the Trojan Ripheus among the blessed : —

" Who would believe, down in the errant world,
That e'er the Trojan Ripheus in this round
Could be the fifth one of these holy lights ?

1 De Monarchia, lib. n. sec. 8.

DANTE 155

Now knoweth he enough of what the world
Has not the power to see of grace divine,
Although his sight may not discern the bottom."

Then he seems to hesitate again, brings in the
Church legend of Trajan brought back to life
by the prayers of Gregory the Great that he
might be converted ; and after an interval of
fifty lines tells us how Ripheus was saved : —

" The other one, through grace, that from so deep
A fountain wells that never hath the eye
Of any creature reached its primal wave,
Set all his love below on righteousness;

Wherefore from grace to grace did God unclose
His eye to our redemption yet to be,
Whence he believed therein, and suffered not

From that day forth the stench of Paganism,
And he reproved therefor the folk perverse.
Those Maidens three, whom at the right-hand wheel r
Thou didst behold, were unto him for baptism
More than a thousand years before baptizing."

If the reader recall a passage already quoted from
the " Convito," 2 he will perhaps think withus that
the gate of Dante's Limbo is left ajar even for the
ancient philosophers to slip out. The divine
judgments are still inscrutable, and the ways of
God past finding out, but faith would seem to

1 Faith, Hope, and Charity. (Purgatorio, xxix. 121.)
Mr. Longfellow has translated the last verse literally. The
meaning is, —

tf More than a thousand years ere baptism was."
* In which the celestial Athens is mentioned.

156 DANTE

have led Dante at last to a more merciful solu
tion of his doubt than he had reached when he
wrote the " De Monarchia." It is always hu
manizing to see how the most rigid creed is made
to bend before the kindlier instincts of the heart.
The stern Dante thinks none beyond hope save
those who are dead in sin, and have made evil
their good. But we are by no means sure that
he is not right in insisting rather on the iijipla-
cable severity of the law than on the possible
relenting of the judge. Exact justice is com
monly more merciful in the long run than pity,
for it tends to foster in men those stronger quali
ties which make them good citizens, an object
second only with the Roman-minded Dante to
that of making them spiritually regenerate, nay,
perhaps even more important as a necessary pre
liminary to it. The inscription over the gate of
hell tells us that the terms on which we receive
the trust of life were fixed by the Divine Power
(which can what it wills), and are therefore
unchangeable ; by the Highest Wisdom, and
therefore for our truest good ; by the Primal
Love, and therefore the kindest. These are the
three attributes of that justice which moved
the maker of them. Dante is no harsher than
experience, which always exacts the uttermost
farthing ; no more inexorable than conscience,
which never forgives nor forgets. No teaching
is truer or more continually needful than that

DANTE 157

the stains of the soul are ineffaceable, and that
though their growth may be arrested, their nature
is to spread insidiously till they have brought all
to their own color. Evil is a far more cunning
and persevering propagandist than Good, for it
has no inward strength, and is driven to seek
countenance and sympathy. It must have com
pany, for it cannot bear to be alone in the dark,
while

" Virtue can see to do what Virtue would
By her own radiant light."

There is one other point which we will dwell
on for a moment as bearing on the question
of Dante's orthodoxy. His nature was one in
which, as in Swedenborg's, a clear practical un
derstanding was continually streamed over by
the northern lights of mysticism, through which
the familiar stars shine with a softened and more
spiritual lustre. Nothing is more interesting
than the way in which the two qualities of his
mind alternate, and indeed play into each other,
tingeing his matter-of-fact sometimes with un
expected glows of fancy, sometimes giving an
almost geometrical precision to his most mys
tical visions. In his letter to Can Grande he says :
" It behooves not those to whom it is given to
know what is best in us to follow the footprints
of the herd ; much rather are they bound to op
pose its wanderings. For the vigorous in intel
lect and reason, endowed with a certain divine

158 DANTE

liberty, are constrained by no customs. Nor is
it wonderful, since they are not governed by the
laws, but much more govern the laws them
selves." It is not impossible that Dante, whose
love of knowledge was all-embracing, may have
got some hint of the doctrine of the Oriental
Sufis. With them the first and lowest of the
steps that lead upward to perfection is the Law,
a strict observance of which is all that is ex
pected of the ordinary man whose mind is not
open to the conception of a higher virtue and
holiness. But the Sufi puts himself under the
guidance of some holy man [Virgil in the In
ferno], whose teaching he receives implicitly,
and so arrives at the second step, which is the
Path [Purgatorio] by which he reaches a point
where he is freed from all outward ceremonials
and observances, and has risen from an outward
to a spiritual worship. The third step is Know
ledge [Paradise] , endowed by which with super
natural insight, he becomes like the angels about
the throne, and has but one farther step to take
before he reaches the goal and becomes one
with God. The analogies of this system with
Dante's are obvious and striking. They be
come still more so when Virgil takes leave of
him at the entrance of the Terrestrial Paradise
with the words : —

" Expect no more a word or sign from me;

Free and upright and sound is thy free-will,

DANTE 159

And error were it not to do its bidding;
Thee o'er thyself I therefore crown and mitre," I —

that is, " I make thee king and bishop over thy
self; the inward light is to be thy law in things
both temporal and spiritual." The originality
of Dante consists in his not allowing any divorce
between the intellect and the soul in its highest
sense, in his making reason and intuition work
together to the same end of spiritual perfection.
The unsatisfactoriness of science leads Faust to
seek repose in worldly pleasure ; it led Dante to
find it in faith, of whose efficacy the shortcoming
of all logical substitutes for it was the most con
vincing argument. That we cannot know, is to
him a proof that there is some higher plane on
which we can believe and see. Dante had dis
covered the incalculable worth of a single idea
as compared with the largest heap of facts ever
gathered. To a man more interested in the soul
of things than in the body of them, the little
finger of Plato is thicker than the loins of
Aristotle.

We cannot but think that there is something
like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the
advance of mankind is necessarily in the direc
tion of science, and not in that of morals. No
doubt the laws of morals existed from the be
ginning, but so also did those of science, and it
is by the application, not the mere recognition,
1 Purgatorio,xxvii. 139-142.

160 DANTE

of both that the race is benefited. No one ques
tions how much science has done for our phys
ical comfort and convenience, and with the mass
of men these perhaps must of necessity precede
the quickening of their moral instincts; but such
material gains are illusory, unless they go hand
in hand with a corresponding ethical advance.
The man who gives his life for a principle has
done more for his kind than he who discovers
a new metal or names a new gas, for the great
motors of the race are moral, not intellectual,
and their force lies ready to the use of the poor
est and weakest of us all. We accept a truth of
science so soon as it is demonstrated, are per
fectly willing to take it on authority, can appro
priate whatever use there may be in it without
the least understanding of its processes, as men
send messages by the electric telegraph, but
every truth of morals must be redemonstrated
in the experience of the individual man before
he is capable of utilizing it as a constituent of
character or a guide in action. A man does not
receive the statements that cc two and two make
four," and that "the pure in heart shall see
God," on the same terms. The one can be
proved to him with four grains of corn ; he can
never arrive at a belief in the other till he realize
it in the intimate persuasion of his whole being.
This is typified in the mystery of the incarna
tion. The divine reason must forever manifest

DANTE 161

itself anew in the lives of men, and that as in
dividuals. This atonement with God, this iden
tification of the man with the truth,1 so that
right action shall not result from the lower rea
son of utility, but from the higher of a will so
purified of self as to sympathize by instinct with
the eternal laws,2 is not something that can be
done once for all, that can become historic and
traditional, a dead flower pressed between the
leaves of the family Bible, but must be renewed
in every generation, and in the soul of every
man, that it may be valid. Certain sects show
their recognition of this in what are called revi
vals, a gross and carnal attempt to apply truth,
as it were, mechanically, and to accomplish by
the etherization of excitement and the magnet-

o

ism of crowds what is possible only in the soli
tary exaltations of the soul. This is the high
moral of Dante's poem. We have likened it to
a Christian basilica; and as in that so there is
here also, painted or carven, every image of
beauty and holiness the artist's mind could con
ceive for the adornment of the holy place. We

1 "I conceived myself to be now/' says Milton, " not as
mine own person, but as a member incorporate into that truth
whereof I was persuaded.''

a " But now was turning my desire and will,

Even as a wheel that equally is moved,
The Love that moves the sun and other stars."

(Paradiso, xxxni., closing verses of the Divina Commedia.}
v

1 62 DANTE

may linger to enjoy these if we will, but if we
follow the central thought that runs like the
nave from entrance to choir, it leads us to an
image of the divine made human, to teach us
how the human might also make itself divine.
Dante beholds at last an image of that Power,
Love, and Wisdom, one in essence, but trine in
manifestation, to answer the needs of our triple
nature and satisfy the senses, the heart, and the
mind.

"Within the deep and luminous subsistence

Of the High Light appeared to me three circles,
Of threefold color and of one dimension,
And by the second seemed the first reflected
As Iris is by Iris, and the third
Seemed fire that equally from both is breathed.

Within itself, of its own very color,

Seemed to me painted with our effigy,
Wherefore my sight was all absorbed therein."

He had reached the high altar where the miracle
of transubstantiation is wrought, itself also a
type of the great conversion that may be ac
complished in our own nature (the lower thing
assuming the qualities of the higher), not by
any process of reason, but by the very fire of
the divine love.

"Then there smote my mind
A flash of lightning wherein came its wish." x
1 Dante seems to allude directly to this article of the Cath
olic faith when he says, on entering the Celestial Paradise,
"to signify transhumanizing by words could not be done,"

DANTE 163

Perhaps it seems little to say that Dante was
the first great poet who ever made a poem
wholly out of himself, but, rightly looked at, it
implies a wonderful self-reliance and originality
in his genius. His is the first keel that ever
ventured into the silent sea of human conscious
ness to find a new world of poetry.

" L' acqua ch' io prendo giammai non si corse." z

He discovered that not only the story of some
heroic person, but that of any man might be
epical ; that the way to heaven was not outside
the world, but through it. Living at a time
when the end of the world was still looked for
as imminent,2 he believed that the second com
ing of the Lord was to take place on no more
conspicuous stage than the soul of man ; that
his kingdom would be established in the sur
rendered will. A poem, the precious distillation
of such a character and such a life as his through
all those sorrowing but undespondent years,
must have a meaning in it which few men have

and questions whether he was there in the renewed spirit
only or in the flesh also: —

" If I was merely ivhat of me thou newly

Createdst, Love, who governest the heavens,
Thou knowest, who didst lift me with thy light ! "

(Paradho, i. 73~75-)

1 Paradiso, n. 7. Lucretius makes the same boast: —

' ' Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante
Trita solo."

* Convito, tratt. n. c. 15.

164 DANTE

meaning enough in themselves wholly to pene
trate. That its allegorical form belongs to a past
fashion, with which the modern mind has little
sympathy, we should no more think of denying
than of whitewashing a fresco of Giotto. But
we may take it as we may Nature, which is also
full of double meanings, either as picture or as
parable, either for the simple delight of its
beauty or as a shadow of the spiritual world.
We may take it as we may history, either for
its picturesqueness or its moral, either for the
variety of its figures, or as a witness to that per
petual presence of God in his creation of which
Dante was so profoundly sensible. He had
seen and suffered much, but it is only to the
man who is himself of value that experience is
valuable. He had not looked on man and Na
ture as most of us do, with less interest than
into the columns of our daily newspaper. He
saw in them the latest authentic news of the
God who made them, for he carried everywhere
that vision washed clear with tears which de
tects the meaning under the mask, and, beneath
the casual and transitory, the eternal keeping its
sleepless watch. The secret of Dante's power
is not far to seek. Whoever can express himself
with the full force of unconscious sincerity will
be found to have uttered something ideal and
universal. Dante intended a didactic poem, but
the most picturesque of poets could not escape

DANTE 165

his genius, and his sermon sings and glows and
charms in a manner that surprises more at the
fiftieth reading than the first, such variety of
freshness is in imagination.

There are no doubt in the " Divina Corn-
media" (regarded merely as poetry) sandy spaces
enough both of physics and metaphysics, but
with every deduction Dante remains the first of
descriptive as well as moral poets. His verse is
as various as the feeling it conveys ; now it has
the terseness and edge of steel, and now palpi
tates with iridescent softness like the breast of
a dove. In vividness he is without a rival. He
drags back by its tangled locks the unwilling
head of some petty traitor of an Italian provin
cial town, lets the fire glare on the sullen face
for a moment, and it sears itself into the mem
ory forever. He shows us an angel glowing
with that love of God which makes him a star
even amid the glory of heaven, and the holy
shape keeps lifelong watch in our fantasy, con
stant as a sentinel. He has the skill of convey
ing impressions indirectly. In the gloom of hell
his bodily presence is revealed by his stirring
something, on the mount of expiation by casting
a shadow. Would he have us feel the bright
ness of an angel ? He makes him whiten afar
through the smoke like a dawn,1 or, walking

1 Purgatorio, xvi. 142. Here is Milton's "Far off his
coming shone."

1 66 DANTE

straight toward the setting sun, he finds his eyes
suddenly unable to withstand a greater splendor
against which his hand is unavailing to shield
him. Even its reflected light, then, is brighter
than the direct ray of the sun.1 And how much
more keenly do we feel the parched lips of
Master Adam for those rivulets of the Casentino
which run down into the Arno, " making their
channels cool and soft"! His comparisons are
as fresh, as simple, and as directly from Nature as
those of Homer.2 Sometimes they show a more
subtle observation, as where he compares the
stooping of Antaeus over him to the leaning
tower of Carisenda, to which the clouds, flying
in an opposite direction to its inclination, give
away their motion.3 His suggestions of in
dividuality, too, from attitude or speech, as in
Farinata, Sordello, or Pia,4 give in a hint what

1 Purgatorio, xv. 7, et seq.

2 See, for example, Inferno, xvn. 127—132; ibid. xxiv.
7—12; Purgatorhy n. 124—129; ibid. in. 79-84; ibid.
xxvii. 76-81; ParadisOy xix. 91—93; ibid. xxi. 34-39; ibid,
xxm. 1-9.

3 Inferno y xxxi. 136—138.

" And those thin clouds above, in flakes and bars,
That give away their motion to the stars."

(Coleridge, Dejection, an Ode.)

See also the comparison of the dimness of the faces seen around
him in Paradise to " a pearl on a white forehead. ' ' ( Paradiso>
m. 14.)

4 Inferno y x. 35-41; PurgatoriOy vi. 6 1-66; ibid. x. 133.

DANTE 167

is worth acres of so-called character-painting.
In straightforward pathos, the single and suffi
cient thrust of phrase, he has no competitor. He
is too sternly touched to be effusive and tearful :

«< Io non piangeva, si dentro impietrai." r

His is always the true coin of speech, —

" Si lucida e si tonda
Che nel suo conio nulla ci s' inforsa," —

and never the highly ornamented promise to pay,
token of insolvency.

No doubt it is primarily by his poetic qualities
that a poet must be judged, for it is by these, if
by anything, that he is to maintain his place in
literature. And he must be judged by them
absolutely, with reference, that is, to the highest
standard, and not relatively to the fashions and
opportunities of the age in which he lived. Yet
these considerations must fairly enter into our
decision of another side of the question, and one
that has much to do with the true quality of the
man, with his character as distinguished from
his talent, and therefore with how much he will
influence men as well as delight them. We may
reckon up pretty exactly a man's advantages and
defects as an artist ; these he has in common with
others, and they are to be measured by a recog-

1 For example, Cavalcanti's Come dices ti egli ebbe? {In
ferno, x. 67, 68.) Anselmuccio's Tu guardi si, padre, che
hai? (Inferno, xxxni. 51.)

1 68 DANTE

nized standard ; but there is something in his
genius that is incalculable. It would be hard to
define the causes of the difference of impression
made upon us respectively by two such men as
.ZEschylus and Euripides, but we feel profoundly
that the latter, though in some respects a better
dramatist, was an infinitely lighter weight, ^s-
chylus stirs something in us far deeper than the
sources of mere pleasurable excitement. The man
behind the verse is far greater than the verse itself,
and the impulse he gives to what is deepest and
most sacred in us, though we cannot always ex
plain it, is none the less real and lasting. Some
men always seem to remain outside their work ;
others make their individuality felt in every part
of it ; their very life vibrates in every verse, and
we do not wonder that it has " made them lean
for many years." The virtue that has gone out
of them abides in what they do. The book such
a man makes is indeed, as Milton called it, " the
precious lifeblood of a master spirit." Theirs
is a true immortality, for it is their soul, and not
their talent, that survives in their work. Dante's
concise forthrightness of phrase, which to that
of most other poets is as a stab * to a blow with
a cudgel, the vigor of his thought, the beauty of
his images, the refinement of his conception of

1 To the "bestiality" of certain arguments Dante says,
" one would wish to reply, not with words, but with a knife."
(Convito, tratt. iv. c. 14.)

DANTE 169

spiritual things, are marvellous if we compare
him with his age and its best achievement. But
it is for his power of inspiring and sustaining, it
is because they find in him a spur to noble aims,
a secure refuge in that defeat which the present
always seems, that they prize Dante who know
and love him best. He is not merely a great
poet, but an influence, part of the soul's resources
in time of trouble. From him she learns that,
"married to the truth, she is a mistress, but
otherwise a slave shut out of all liberty." r

All great poets have their message to deliver
us, from something higher than they. We ven
ture on no unworthy comparison between him
who reveals to us the beauty of this world's love
and the grandeur of this world's passion and
him who shows that love of God is the fruit
whereof all other loves are but the beautiful and
fleeting blossom, that the passions are yet sub-
limer objects of contemplation, when, subdued
by the will, they become patience in suffering and
perseverance in the upward path. But we can
not help thinking that if Shakespeare be the
most comprehensive intellect, so Dante is the
highest spiritual nature that has expressed itself
in rhythmical form. Had he merely made us
feel how petty the ambitions, sorrows, and vexa
tions of earth appear when looked down on from
the heights of our own character and the seclu-
1 Convito, tratt. iv. c. 2.

i;o DANTE

sion of our own genius, or from the region where
we commune with God, he had done much: —

«' I with my sight returned through one and all

The sevenfold spheres, and I beheld this globe
Such that I smiled at its ignoble semblance." x

But he has done far more ; he has shown us the
way by which that country far beyond the stars
may be reached, may become the habitual dwell
ing-place and fortress of our nature, instead of
being the object of its vague aspiration in mo
ments of indolence. At the Round Table of King
Arthur there was left always one seat empty for
him who should accomplish the adventure of
the Holy Grail. It was called the perilous seat
because of the dangers he must encounter who
would win it. In the company of the epic poets
there was a place left for whoever should em
body the Christian idea of a triumphant life,
outwardly all defeat, inwardly victorious, who
should make us partakers of that cup of sorrow
in which all are communicants with Christ. He
who should do this would indeed achieve the
perilous seat, for he must combine poesy with
doctrine in such cunning wise that the one lose
not its beauty nor the other its severity, — and
Dante has done it. As he takes possession of
it we seem to hear the cry he himself heard when
Virgil rejoined the company of great singers, —

" All honor to the loftiest of poets ! "
1 Paradiso, xxn. 132-135; ibid. xxvu. no.

WORDSWORTH

WORDSWORTH

1875

A GENERATION has now passed away
since Wordsworth was laid with the family
in the churchyard at Grasmere.1 Perhaps
it is hardly yet time to take a perfectly impar
tial measure of his value as a poet. To do this
is especially hard for those who are old enough
to remember the last shot which the foe was
sullenly firing in that long war of critics which
began when he published his manifesto as Pre
tender, and which came to a pause rather than
to an end when they flung up their caps with
the rest at his final coronation. Something of the
intensity of the odium theologicum (if indeed
the aestheticum be not in these days the more
bitter of the two) entered into the conflict. The
Wordsworthians were a sect, who, if they had
the enthusiasm, had also not a little of the

1 " I pay many little visits to the family in the churchyard
at Grasmere," writes James Dixon (an old servant of Words
worth) to Crabb Robinson, with a simple, one might almost
say canine pathos, thirteen years after his wife's death. Words
worth was always considerate and kind with his servants,
Robinson tells us.

i?4 WORDSWORTH

exclusiveness and partiality to which sects are
liable. The verses of the master had for them
the virtue of religious canticles stimulant of
zeal and not amenable to the ordinary tests of
cold-blooded criticism. Like the hymns of the
Huguenots and Covenanters, they were songs of
battle no less than of worship, and the combined
ardors of conviction and conflict lent them a fire
that was not naturally their own. As we read
them now, that virtue of the moment is gone out
of them, and whatever of Dr. Wattsiness there is
gives us a slight shock of disenchantment. It
is something like the difference between the
cc Marseillaise " sung by armed propagandists
on the edge of battle, or by Brissotins in the
tumbrel, and the words of it read coolly in
the closet, or recited with the factitious frenzy
of Therese. It was natural in the early days of
Wordsworth's career to dwell most fondly on
those profounder qualities to appreciate which
settled in some sort the measure of a man's right
to judge of poetry at all. But now we must admit
the shortcomings, the failures, the defects as no
less essential elements in forming a sound judg
ment as to whether the seer and artist were so
united in him as to justify the claim first put in by
himself and afterwards maintained by his sect to
a place beside the few great poets who exalt men's
minds, and give a right direction and safe out
let to their passions through the imagination,

WORDSWORTH 175

while insensibly helping them toward balance
of character and serenity of judgment by stimu
lating their sense of proportion, form, and the
nice adjustment of means to ends. In none of
our poets has the constant propulsion of an un
bending will, and the concentration of exclusive,
if I must not say somewhat narrow, sympathies
done so much to make the original endow
ment of Nature effective, and in none accord
ingly does the biography throw so much light
on the works, or enter so largely into their com
position as an element whether of power or of
weakness. Wordsworth never saw, and I think
never wished to see, beyond the limits of his
own consciousness and experience. He early
conceived himself to be, and through life was
confirmed by circumstances in the faith that he
was, a " dedicated spirit," ' a state of mind likely
to further an intense but at the same time one
sided development of the intellectual powers.
The solitude in which the greater part of his
mature life was passed, while it doubtless min
istered to the passionate intensity of his musings
upon man and Nature, was, it may be suspected,

1 In the Prelude he attributes this consecration to a sunrise
seen (during a college vacation) as he walked homeward from
some village festival where he had danced all night : —

* * My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me
Was given that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit." (Bk. iv.)

1 76 WORDSWORTH

harmful to him as an artist, by depriving him
of any standard of proportion outside himself
by which to test the comparative value of his
thoughts, and by rendering him more and more
incapable of that urbanity of mind which could
be gained only by commerce with men more
nearly on his own level, and which gives tone
without lessening individuality. Wordsworth
never quite saw the distinction between the
eccentric and the original. For what we call
originality seems not so much anything pecu
liar, much less anything odd, but that quality
in a man which touches human nature at most
points of its circumference, which reinvigorates
the consciousness of our own powers by recall
ing and confirming our own unvalued sensations
and perceptions, gives classic shape to our own
amorphous imaginings, and adequate utterance
to our own stammering conceptions or emotions.
The poet's office is to be a Voice, not of one
crying in the wilderness to a knot of already
magnetized acolytes, but singing amid the
throng of men, and lifting their common aspi
rations and sympathies (so first clearly revealed
to themselves) on the wings of his song to a
purer ether and a wider reach of view. We
cannot, if we would, read the poetry of Words
worth as mere poetry ; at every other page we
find ourselves entangled in a problem of aesthet
ics. The world-old question of matter and form,

WORDSWORTH 177

of whether nectar is of precisely the same flavor
when served to us from a Grecian chalice or
from any jug of ruder pottery, comes up for
decision anew. The Teutonic nature has al
ways shown a sturdy preference of the solid
bone with a marrow of nutritious moral to any
shadow of the same on the flowing mirror of
sense. Wordsworth never lets us long forget
the deeply rooted stock from which he sprang,
— vien ben da lui.

William Wordsworth was born at Cocker-
mouth in Cumberland, on the jth of April,
1770, the second of five children. His father
was John Wordsworth, an attorney-at-law, and
agent of Sir James Lowther, afterwards first
Earl of Lonsdale. His mother was Anne Cook-
son, the daughter of a mercer in Penrith. His
paternal ancestors had been settled immemo-
rially at Penistone in Yorkshire, whence his
grandfather had emigrated to Westmoreland.
His mother, a woman of piety and wisdom,
died in March, 1778, being then in her thirty-
second year. His father, who never entirely
cast off the depression occasioned by her death,
survived her but five years, dying in December,
1783, when William was not quite fourteen years
old.

The poet's early childhood was passed partly
at Cockermouth, and partly with his maternal

178 WORDSWORTH

grandfather at Penrith. His first teacher appears
to have been Mrs. Anne Birkett, a kind of Shen-
stone's Schoolmistress, who practised the mem
ory of her pupils, teaching them chiefly by rote,
and not endeavoring to cultivate their reasoning
faculties, a process by which children are apt to
be converted from natural logicians into imper
tinent sophists. Among his schoolmates here
was Mary Hutchinson, who afterwards became
his wife.

In 1778 he was sent to a school founded by
Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York,1 in the year
1585, at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawks-
head is a small market-town in the vale of Esth-
waite, about a third of a mile northwest of the
lake. Here Wordsworth passed nine years,
among a people of simple habits and scenery of
a sweet and pastoral dignity. His earliest inti
macies were with the mountains, lakes, and
streams of his native district, and the associa
tions with which his mind was stored during its
most impressible period were noble and pure.
The boys were boarded among the dames of
the village, thus enjoying a freedom from scho
lastic restraints, which could be nothing but
beneficial in a place where the temptations were

1 Father of George Sandys, treasurer of the Virginia
Company, translator, while in Virginia, of Ovid's Metamor
phoses, and author of a book of travels in the East dear to Dr.
Johnson.

WORDSWORTH 179

only to sports that hardened the body while
they fostered a love of nature in the spirit and
habits of observation in the mind. Words
worth's ordinary amusements here were hunting
and fishing, rowing, skating, and long walks
around the lake and among the hills, with an
occasional scamper on horseback.1 His life as
a schoolboy was favorable also to his poetic
development, in being identified with that of
the people among whom he lived. Among men
of simple habits, and where there are small
diversities of condition, the feelings and passions
are displayed with less restraint, and the young
poet grew acquainted with that primal human
basis of character where the Muse finds firm
foothold, and to which he ever afterward cleared
his way through all the overlying drift of con
ventionalism. The dalesmen were a primitive
and hardy race who kept alive the traditions and
often the habits of a more picturesque time. A
common level of interests and of social standing
fostered unconventional ways of thought and
speech, and friendly human sympathies. Soli
tude induced reflection, a reliance of the mind on
its own resources, and individuality of character.
Where everybody knew everybody, and every
body's father had known everybody's father, the
interest of man in man was not likely to become
a matter of cold hearsay and distant report.
1 Prelude, bk. n.

i8o WORDSWORTH

When death knocked at any door in the ham
let, there was an echo from every fireside, and a
wedding dropt its white flowers at every thresh
old. There was not a grave in the churchyard
but had its story ; not a crag or glen or aged
tree untouched with some ideal hue of legend.
It was here that Wordsworth learned that homely
humanity which gives such depth and sincerity
to his poems. Travel, society, culture, nothing
could obliterate the deep trace of that early train
ing which enables him to speak directly to the
primitive instincts of man. He was apprenticed
early to the difficult art of being himself.

At school he wrote some task-verses on sub
jects imposed by the master, and also some vol
untaries of his own, equally undistinguished by
any peculiar merit. But he seems to have made
up his mind as early as in his fourteenth year
to become a poet.1 " It is recorded," says his
biographer vaguely, " that the poet's father set
him very early to learn portions of the best
English poets by heart, so that at an early age
he could repeat large portions of Shakespeare,
Milton, and Spenser." 2

1 "I to the muses have been bound,

These fourteen years, by strong indentures."

(Idiot Boy, 1798.)

2 I think this more than doubtful, for I find no traces of the
influence of any of these poets in his earlier writings. Gold
smith was evidently his model in the Descriptive Sketches and
the Evening Walk. I speak of them as originally printed.

WORDSWORTH 181

The great event of Wordsworth's school-days
was the death of his father, who left what may
be called a hypothetical estate, consisting chiefly
of claims upon the first Earl of Lonsdale, the
payment of which, though their justice was
acknowledged, that nobleman contrived in some
unexplained way to elude so long as he lived.
In October, 1787, he left school for St. John's
College, Cambridge. He was already, we are
told, a fair Latin scholar, and had made some
progress in mathematics. The earliest books
we hear of his reading were " Don Quixote,"
"Gil Bias," "Gulliver's Travels," and the
" Tale of a Tub "; but at school he had also
become familiar with the works of some Eng
lish poets, particularly Goldsmith and Gray, of
whose poems he had learned many by heart.
What is more to the purpose, he had become,
without knowing it, a lover of Nature in all
her moods, and the same mental necessities of
a solitary life which compel men to an interest
in the transitory phenomena of scenery had
made him also studious of the movements of
his own mind, and the mutual interaction and
dependence of the external and internal uni
verse.

Doubtless his early orphanage was not with
out its effect in confirming a character naturally
impatient of control, and his mind, left to itself,
clothed itself with an indigenous growth, which

1 82 WORDSWORTH

grew fairly and freely, unstinted by the shadow
of exotic plantations. It has become a truism,
that remarkable persons have remarkable mo
thers ; but perhaps this is chiefly true of such
as have made themselves distinguished by their
industry, and by the assiduous cultivation of
faculties in themselves of only an average quality.
It is rather to be noted how little is known of
the parentage of men of the first magnitude,
how often they seem in some sort foundlings,
and how early an apparently adverse destiny
begins the culture of those who are to encounter
and master great intellectual or spiritual ex
periences.

Of his disposition as a child little is known,
but that little is characteristic. He himself tells
us that he was " stiff, moody, and of violent
temper." His mother said of him that he was
the only one of her children about whom she
felt any anxiety, — for she was sure that he
would be remarkable for good or evil. Once,
in resentment at some fancied injury, he re
solved to kill himself, but his heart failed him.
I suspect that few boys of passionate tempera
ment have escaped these momentary sugges
tions of despairing helplessness. " On another
occasion," he says, " while I was at my grand
father's house at Penrith, along with my eldest
brother Richard, we were whipping tops to
gether in the long drawing-room, on which the

WORDSWORTH 183

carpet was only laid down on particular occa
sions. The walls were hung round with family
pictures, and I said to my brother, ( Dare you
strike your whip through that old lady's petti
coat ? ' He replied, c No, I won't/ < Then,'
said I, ( here goes/ and I struck my lash through
her hooped petticoat, for which, no doubt,
though I have forgotten it, I was properly pun
ished. But, possibly from some want of judg
ment in punishments inflicted, I had become
perverse and obstinate in defying chastisement,
and rather proud of it than otherwise." This
last anecdote is as happily typical as a bit of
Greek mythology which always prefigured the
lives of heroes in the stories of their childhood.
Just so do we find him afterward striking his
defiant lash through the hooped petticoat of the
artificial style of poetry, and proudly unsubdued
by the punishment of the Reviewers.

Of his college life the chief record is to be
found in " The Prelude." He did not distin
guish himself as a scholar, and if his life had
any incidents, they were of that interior kind
which rarely appear in biography, though they
may be of controlling influence upon the life.
He speaks of reading Chaucer, Spenser, and
Milton while at Cambridge,1 but no reflection

1 Prelude, bk. in. He studied Italian also at Cambridge;
his teacher, whose name was Isola, had formerly taught the
poet Gray. It may be pretty certainly inferred, however, that

1 84 WORDSWORTH

from them is visible in his earliest published
poems. The greater part of his vacations was
spent in his native Lake Country, where his
only sister, Dorothy, was the companion of his
rambles. She was a woman of large natural en
dowments, chiefly of the receptive kind, and
had much to do with the formation and tend
ency of the poet's mind. It was she who called
forth the shyer sensibilities of his nature, and
taught an originally harsh and austere imagina
tion to surround itself with fancy and feeling, as
the rock fringes itself with a sun-spray of ferns.
She was his first Public, and belonged to that
class of prophetically appreciative temperaments
whose apparent office it is to cheer the early
solitude of original minds with messages from
the future. Through the greater part of his life
she continued to be a kind of poetical conscience
to him.

Wordsworth's last college vacation was spent
in a foot journey upon the Continent (1790).
In January, 1791, he took his degree of B. A.,
and left Cambridge. During the summer of
this year he visited Wales, and, after declining
to enter upon holy orders under the plea that

his first systematic study of English poetry was due to the
copy of Anderson's British Poets, left with him by his sailor
brother John on setting out for his last voyage in 1805. It
was the daughter of this Isola, Emma, who was afterwards
adopted by Charles and Mary Lamb.

WORDSWORTH 185

he was not of age for ordination, went over to
France in November, and remained during the
winter at Orleans. Here he became intimate
with the republican General Beaupuis, with
whose hopes and aspirations he ardently sym
pathized. In the spring of 1792 he was at Blois,
and returned thence to Orleans, which he finally
quitted in October for Paris. He remained
here as long as he could with safety, and at the
close of the year went back to England, thus,
perhaps, escaping the fate which soon after over
took his friends the Brissotins.

As hitherto the life of Wordsworth may be
called a fortunate one, not less so in the train
ing and expansion of his faculties was this period
of his stay in France. Born and reared in a
country where the homely and familiar nestles
confidingly amid the most savage and sublime
forms of Nature, he had experienced whatever
impulses the creative faculty can receive from
mountain and cloud and the voices of winds
and waters, but he had known man only as an
aotor in fireside histories and tragedies, for which
the hamlet supplied an ample stage. In France
he first felt the authentic beat of a nation's heart;
he was a spectator at one of those dramas where
the terrible footfall of the Eumenides is heard
nearer and nearer in the pauses of the action ;
and he saw man such as he can only be when
he is vibrated by the orgasm of a national emo-

1 86 WORDSWORTH

don. He sympathized with the hopes of France
and of mankind deeply, as was fitting in a young
man and a poet ; and if his faith in the gregari
ous advancement of men was afterward shaken,
he only held the more firmly by his belief in
the individual, and his reverence for the human
as something quite apart from the popular
and above it. Wordsworth has been unwisely
blamed, as if he had been recreant to the liberal
instincts of his youth. But it was inevitable that
a genius so regulated and metrical as his, a mind
which always compensated itself for its artistic
radicalism by an involuntary leaning toward
external respectability, should recoil from what
ever was convulsionary and destructive in poli
tics, and above all in religion. He reads the
poems of Wordsworth without understanding,
who does not find in them the noblest incen
tives to faith in man and the grandeur of his
destiny, founded always upon that personal dig
nity and virtue, the capacity for whose attain
ment alone makes universal liberty possible and
assures its permanence. He was to make men
better by opening to them the sources of an in
alterable well-being; to make them free, in a
sense higher than political, by showing them
that these sources are within them, and that no
contrivance of man can permanently emancipate
narrow natures and depraved minds. His pol
ities were always those of a poet, circling in the

WORDSWORTH 187

larger orbit of causes and principles, careless of
the transitory oscillation of events.

The change in his point of view (if change
there was) certainly was complete soon after his
return from France, and was perhaps due in part
to the influence of Burke.

" While he [Burke] forewarns, denounces, launches forth,
Against all systems built on abstract rights,
Keen ridicule; the majesty proclaims
Of institutes and laws hallowed by time;
Declares the vital power of social ties
Endeared by custom; and with high disdain,
Exploding upstart theory, insists
Upon the allegiance to which men are born.
. . . Could a youth, and one
In ancient story versed, whose breast hath heaved
Under the weight of classic eloquence,
Sit, see, and hear, unthankful, uninspired ? " x

He had seen the French for a dozen years
eagerly busy in tearing up whatever had roots
in the past, replacing the venerable trunks of
tradition and orderly growth with liberty-poles,
then striving vainly to piece together the fibres
they had broken, and to reproduce artificially
that sense of permanence and continuity which
is the main safeguard of vigorous self-conscious
ness in a nation. He became a Tory through

1 Prelude, bk. vn. Written before 1805, and referring to
a still earlier date. " Wordsworth went in powder, and with
cocked hat under his arm, to the Marchioness of Stafford's
rout." (Southey to Miss Barker, May, 1806.)

1 88 WORDSWORTH

intellectual conviction, retaining, I suspect, to
the last, a certain radicalism of temperament and
instinct. As in Carlyle, so in him something of
the peasant survived to the last. Haydon tells
us that in 1809 Sir George Beaumont said to
him and Wilkie, "Wordsworth may perhaps
walk in ; if he do, I caution you both against
his terrific democratic notions " ; and it must
have been many years later that Wordsworth
himself told Crabb Robinson, " I have no re
spect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great
deal of the Chartist in me." In 1802, during
his tour in Scotland, he travelled on Sundays as
on the other days of the week.1 He afterwards
became a theoretical churchgoer. " Wordsworth
defended earnestly the Church establishment.
He even said he would shed his blood for it.
Nor was he disconcerted by a laugh raised
against him on account of his having confessed
that he knew not when he had been in a church
in his own country. c All our ministers are so
vile/ said he. The mischief of allowing the
clergy to depend on the caprice of the multi
tude he thought more than outweighed all the
evils of an establishment." 2

In December, 1792, Wordsworth had re-

1 This was probably one reason for the long suppression
of Miss Wordsworth's journal, which she had evidently pre
pared for publication as early as 1805.

2 Crabb Robinson, i. 250, Am. ed.

WORDSWORTH 189

turned to England, and in the following year pub
lished "Descriptive Sketches " and the " Even
ing Walk." He did this, as he says in one of
his letters, to show that, although he had gained
no honors at the University, he could do some
thing. They met with no great success, and he
afterward corrected them so much as to destroy
all their interest as juvenile productions, with
out communicating to them any of the merits
of maturity. In commenting, sixty years after
ward, on a couplet in one of these poems, —

" And, fronting the bright west, the oak entwines
Its darkening boughs and leaves in stronger lines, " —

he says : " This is feebly and imperfectly ex
pressed, but I recollect distinctly the very spot
where this first struck me. . . . The moment
was important in my poetical history ; for I date
from it my consciousness of the infinite variety
of natural appearances which had been unnoticed
by the poets of any age or country, so far as I
was acquainted with them, and I made a reso
lution to supply in some degree the deficiency."
It is plain that Wordsworth's memory was
playing him a trick here, misled by that instinct
(it may almost be called) of consistency which
leads men first to desire that their lives should
have been without break or seam, and then to
believe that they have been such. The more
distant ranges of perspective are apt to run to
gether in retrospection. How far could Words-

190 WORDSWORTH

worth at fourteen have been acquainted with the
poets of all ages and countries, — he who to his
dying day could not endure to read Goethe and
knew nothing of Calderon ? It seems to me
rather that the earliest influence traceable in him
is that of Goldsmith, and later of Cowper, and
it is, perhaps, some slight indication of its hav
ing already begun that his first volume of " De
scriptive Sketches" (1793) was put forth by
Johnson, who was Cowper's publisher. By and
by the powerful impress of Burns is seen both
in the topics of his verse and the form of his
expression. But whatever the ultimate effect of
these poets upon his style, certain it is that his
juvenile poems were clothed in the conventional
habit of the eighteenth century. " The first
verses from which he remembered to have re
ceived great pleasure were Miss Carter's ( Poem
on Spring/ a poem in the six-line stanza which
he was particularly fond of and had composed
much in, — for example, < Ruth/ ' This is note
worthy, for Wordsworth's lyric range, especially
so far as tune is concerned, was always narrow.
His sense of melody was painfully dull, and
some of his lighter effusions, as he would have
called them, are almost ludicrously wanting in
grace of movement. We cannot expect in a
modern poet the thrush-like improvisation, the
bewitchingly impulsive cadences, that charm us
in our Elizabethan drama and whose last warble

WORDSWORTH 191

died with Herrick ; but Shelley, Tennyson, and
Browning have shown that the simple pathos
of their music was not irrecoverable, even if
the artless poignancy of their phrase be gone
beyond recall. We feel this lack in Wordsworth
all the more keenly if we compare such verses as

" Like an army defeated
The snow hath retreated
And now doth fare ill
On the top of the bare hill "

with Goethe's exquisite " Ueber alien Gipfeln
ist Ruh," in which the lines (as if shaken down
by a momentary breeze of emotion) drop lin-
geringly one after another like blossoms upon
turf.

The " Evening Walk " and " Descriptive
Sketches " show plainly the prevailing influence
of Goldsmith, both in the turn of thought and
the mechanism of the verse. They lack alto
gether the temperance of tone and judgment in
selection which have made the " Traveller " and
the " Deserted Village," perhaps the most truly
classical poems in the language. They bear here
and there, however, the unmistakable stamp of
the maturer Wordsworth, not only in a certain
blunt realism, but in the intensity and truth of
picturesque epithet. Of this realism, from which
Wordsworth never wholly freed himself, the fol
lowing verses may suffice as a specimen. After
describing the fate of a chamois-hunter killed by

192 WORDSWORTH

falling from a crag, his fancy goes back to the
bereaved wife and son : —

« ' Haply that child in fearful doubt may gaze,
Passing his father's bones in future days,
Start at the reliques of that very thigh
On which so oft he prattled when a boy."

In these poems there is plenty of that "poetic
diction" against which Wordsworth was to lead
the revolt nine years later.

" To wet the peak's impracticable sides
He opens of his feet the sanguine tides,
Weak and more weak the issuing current eyes
Lapped by the panting tongue of thirsty skies."

Both of these passages have disappeared from
the revised edition, as well as some curious out
bursts of that motiveless despair which Byron
made fashionable not long after. Nor are there
wanting touches of fleshliness which strike us
oddly as coming from Wordsworth.1

"Farewell! those forms that in thy noontide shade
Rest near their little plots of oaten glade,
Those steadfast eyes that beating breasts inspire
To throw the 'sultry ray ' of young Desire;
Those lips whose tides of fragrance come and go
Accordant to the cheek's unquiet glow;
Those shadowy breasts in love's soft light arrayed,
And rising by the moon of passion swayed."
1 Wordsworth's purity afterwards grew sensitive almost to
prudery. The late Mr. Clough told me that he heard him at
Dr. Arnold's table denounce the first line in Keats' s Ode to a
Grecian Urn as indecent, and Haydon records that when he
saw the group of Cupid and Psyche he exclaimed, "The
dev-ils!"

WORDSWORTH 193

The political tone is also mildened in the revi
sion, as where he changes " despot courts " into
" tyranny." One of the alterations is interest
ing. In the "Evening Walk" he had originally
written —

" And bids her soldier come her wars to share
Asleep on Minden's charnel hill afar."

An erratum at the end directs us to correct the
second verse, thus : —

" Asleep on Bunker's charnel hill afar." *

Wordsworth somewhere rebukes the poets for
making the owl a bodeful bird. He had him
self done so in the " Evening Walk," and cor
rects his epithets to suit his later judgment, put
ting " gladsome " for " boding " and replacing

"The tremulous sob of the complaining owl "

by

"The sportive outcry of the mocking owl."

Indeed, the character of the two poems is so
much changed in the revision as to make the
dates appended to them a misleading anachron
ism. But there is one truly Wordsworthian pass
age which already gives us a glimpse of that
passion with which he was the first to irradiate

1 The whole passage is omitted in the revised edition. The
original, a quarto pamphlet, is now very rare, but fortunately
Charles Lamb's copy of it is now owned by my friend Pro
fessor C. E. Norton.

i94 WORDSWORTH

descriptive poetry, and which sets him on a level
with Turner.

" 'T is storm; and hid in mist from hour to hour
All day the floods a deepening murmur pour;
The sky is veiled and every cheerful sight;
Dark is the region as with coming night;
But what a sudden burst of overpowering light !
Triumphant on the bosom of the storm,
Glances the fire-clad eagle's wheeling form;
Eastward, in long prospective glittering shine
The wood-crowned cliffs that o'er the lake recline;
Those eastern cliffs a hundred streams unfold,
At once to pillars turned that flame with gold;
Behind his sail the peasant tries to shun
The West that burns like one dilated sun,
Where in a mighty crucible expire
The mountains, glowing hot like coals of fire. ' '

Wordsworth has made only one change in these
verses, and that for the worse, by substituting
"glorious" (which was already implied in
" glances " and " fire-clad ") for " wheeling." In
later life he would have found it hard to forgive
the man who should have made cliffs recline
over a lake. On the whole, what strikes us as
most prophetic in these poems is their want of
continuity, and the purple patches of true poetry
on a texture of unmistakable prose ; perhaps we
might add the incongruous clothing of prose
thoughts in the ceremonial robes of poesy.

During the same year (1793) he wrote, but
did not publish, a political tract, in which he

WORDSWORTH 195

avowed himself opposed to monarchy and to
the hereditary principle, and desirous of a re
public, if it could be had without a revolution.
He probably continued to be all his life in favor
of that ideal republic " which never was on land
or sea/' but fortunately he gave up politics that
he might devote himself to his own nobler call
ing, to which politics are subordinate, and for
which he found freedom enough in England as
it was.1 Dr. Wordsworth admits that his uncle's
opinions were democratical so late as 1802. I
suspect that they remained so in an esoteric way

1 Wordsworth showed his habitual good sense in never
sharing, so far as is known, the communistic dreams of his
friends Coleridge and Southey. The latter of the two had,
to be sure, renounced them shortly after his marriage, and
before his acquaintance with Wordsworth began. But Cole
ridge seems to have clung to them longer. There is a passage
in one of his letters to Cottle (without date, but apparently
written in the spring of 1798) which would imply that
Wordsworth had been accused of some kind of social heresy.
" Wordsworth has been caballed against so long and so loudly
that he has found it impossible to prevail on the tenant of the
Allfoxden estate to let him the house after their first agreement
is expired." Perhaps, after all, it was Wordsworth's insula
tion of character and habitual want of sympathy with anything
but the moods of his own mind that rendered him incapable
of this copartnery of enthusiasm. He appears to have regarded
even his sister Dorothy (whom he certainly loved as much as
it was possible for him to love anything but his own poems)
as a kind of tributary dependency of his genius, much as a
mountain might look down on one of its ancillary spurs.

196 WORDSWORTH

to the end of his days. He had himself suffered
by the arbitrary selfishness of a great landholder,
and he was born and bred in a part of England
where there is a greater social equality than else
where. The look and manner of the Cumber
land people especially are such as recall very
vividly to a New Englander the associations of
fifty years ago, ere the change from New England
to New Ireland had begun. But meanwhile,
Want, which makes no distinctions of Mon
archist or Republican, was pressing upon him.
The debt due to his father's estate had not been
paid, and Wordsworth was one of those rare
idealists who esteem it the first duty of a friend
of humanity to live for, and not on, his neigh
bor. He at first proposed establishing a period
ical journal to be called " The Philanthropist,"
but luckily went no further with it, for the re
ceipts from an organ of opinion which professed
republicanism, and at the same time discoun
tenanced the plans of all existing or defunct
republicans, would have been necessarily scanty.
There being no appearance of any demand,
present or prospective, for philanthropists, he
tried to get employment as correspondent of a
newspaper. Here also it was impossible that he
should succeed ; he was too great to be merged
in the editorial We, and had too well defined
a private opinion on all subjects to be able to
express that average of public opinion which

WORDSWORTH 197

constitutes able editorials. But so it is that to
the prophet in the wilderness the birds of ill
omen are already on the wing with food from
heaven ; and while Wordsworth's relatives were
getting impatient at what they considered his
waste of time, while one thought he had gifts
enough to make a good parson, and another
lamented the rare attorney that was lost in him/
the prescient muse guided the hand of Raisley
Calvert while he wrote the poet's name in his will

1 Speaking to one of his neighbors in 1845 he said, " that,
after he had finished his college course, he was in great doubt
as to what his future employment should be. He did not feel
himself good enough for the Church; he felt that his mind was
not properly disciplined for that holy office, and that the
struggle between his conscience and his impulses would have
made life a torture. He also shrank from the Law, although
Southey often told him that he was well fitted for the higher
parts of the profession. He had studied military history with
great interest, and the strategy of war; and he always fancied
that he had talents for command; and he at one time thought
of a military life, but then he was without connections, and
he felt, if he were ordered to the West Indies, his talents
would not save him from the yellow fever, and he gave that
up." (Memoirs, ii. 466.) It is curious to fancy Wordsworth
a soldier. Certain points of likeness between him and Welling
ton have often struck me. They resemble each other in prac
tical good sense, fidelity to duty, courage, and also in a kind
of precise uprightness which made their personal character
somewhat uninteresting. But what was decorum in Welling
ton was piety in Wordsworth, and the entire absence of im
agination (the great point of dissimilarity) perhaps helped as
much as anything to make Wellington a great commander.

198 WORDSWORTH

for a legacy of ^900. By the death of Calvert,
in 1795, this timely help came to Wordsworth at
the turning-point of his life, and made it honest
for him to write poems that will never die, instead
of theatrical critiques as ephemeral as play-bills,
or leaders that led only to oblivion.

In the autumn of 1795 Wordsworth and his
sister took up their abode at Racedown Lodge,
near Crewkerne, in Dorsetshire. Here nearly
two years were passed, chiefly in the study of
poetry, and Wordsworth to some extent re
covered from the fierce disappointment of his
political dreams, and regained that equable tenor
of mind which alone is consistent with a healthy
productiveness. Here Coleridge, who had con
trived to see something more in the " Descrip
tive Sketches " than the public had discovered
there, first made his acquaintance. The sympa
thy and appreciation of an intellect like Cole
ridge's supplied him with that external motive to
activity which is the chief use of popularity, and
justified to him his opinion of his own powers.
It was now that the tragedy of" The Borderers "
was for the most part written, and that plan of
the " Lyrical Ballads " suggested which gave
Wordsworth a clue to lead him out of the meta
physical labyrinth in which he was entangled.
It was agreed between the two young friends
that Wordsworth was to be a philosophic poet,
and, by a good fortune uncommon to such

WORDSWORTH 199

conspiracies, Nature had already consented to
the arrangement. In July, 1797, the two Words-
worths removed to Allfoxden in Somersetshire,
that they might be near Coleridge, who in the
mean while had married and settled himself at
Nether-Stowey. In November " The Border
ers " was finished, and Wordsworth went up to
London with his sister to offer it for the stage.
The good Genius of the poet again interposing,
the play was decisively rejected, and Words
worth went back to Allfoxden, himself the hero
of that first tragi-comedy so common to young
authors.

The play has fine passages, but is as unreal
as " Jane Eyre." It shares with many of Words
worth's narrative poems the defect of being writ
ten to illustrate an abstract moral theory, so that
the overbearing thesis is continually thrusting
the poetry to the wall. Applied to the drama,
such predestination makes all the personages
puppets and disenables them for being charac
ters. Wordsworth seems to have felt this when
he published "The Borderers" in 1842, and
says in a note that it was " at first written . . .
without any view to its exhibition upon the
stage." But he was mistaken. The contempo
raneous letters of Coleridge to Cottle show that
he was long in giving up the hope of getting it
accepted by some theatrical manager.

He now applied himself to the preparation

200 WORDSWORTH

of the first volume of the "Lyrical Ballads " for
the press, and it was published toward the close
of 1798. The book, which contained also " The
Ancient Mariner " of Coleridge, attracted little
notice, and that in great part contemptuous.
When Mr. Cottle, the publisher, shortly after
sold his copyrights to Mr. Longman, that of
the " Lyrical Ballads " was reckoned at zero, and
it was at last given up to the authors. A few
persons were not wanting, however, who dis
covered the dawn-streaks of a new day in that
light which the critical fire-brigade thought to
extinguish with a few contemptuous spurts of
cold water.1

Lord Byron describes himself as waking one
morning and finding himself famous, and it is
quite an ordinary fact that a blaze may be made
with a little saltpetre that will be stared at by

1 Cottle says, " The sale was so slow and the severity of
most of the reviews so great that its progress to oblivion seemed
to be certain. " But the notices in the Monthly and Critical
reviews (then the most influential) were fair, and indeed
favorable, especially to Wordsworth's share in the volume.
The Monthly says, " So much genius and originality are dis
covered in this publication that we wish to see another from
the same hand." The Critical, after saying that "in the
whole range of English poetry we scarcely recollect anything
superior to a passage in Lines written near Tintern Abbey ,"
sums up thus : «' Yet every piece discovers genius; and ill as
the author has frequently employed his talents, they certainly
rank him with the best of living poets." Such treatment
surely cannot be called discouraging.

WORDSWORTH 201

thousands who would have thought the sunrise
tedious. If we may believe his biographer,
Wordsworth might have said that he awoke
and found himself in-famous, for the publica
tion of the " Lyrical Ballads " undoubtedly
raised him to the distinction of being the least
popular poet in England. Parnassus has two
peaks ; the one where improvising poets clus
ter ; the other where the singer of deep secrets
sits alone, — a peak veiled sometimes from the
whole morning of a generation by earth-born
mists and smoke of kitchen fires, only to glow
the more consciously at sunset, and after night
fall to crown itself with imperishable stars.
Wordsworth had that self-trust which in the
man of genius is sublime, and in the man of
talent insufferable. It mattered not to him
though all the reviewers had been in a chorus
of laughter or a conspiracy of silence behind
him. He went quietly over to Germany to write
more Lyrical Ballads, and to begin a poem on
the growth of his own mind, at a time when
there were only two men in the world (himself
and Coleridge) who were aware that he had one
in anywise differing from those, mechanically
uniform, which are stuck drearily, side by side,
in the great pin-paper of society.

In Germany Wordsworth dined in company
with Klopstock, and after dinner they had a
conversation, of which Wordsworth took notes.

202 WORDSWORTH

The respectable old poet, who was passing the
evening of his days by the chimney-corner,
Darby and Joan like, with his respectable Muse,
seems to have been rather bewildered by the
apparition of a living genius. The record is of
value now chiefly for the insight it gives us into
Wordsworth's mind. Among other things he
said, " that it was the province of a great poet
to raise people up to his own level, not to de
scend to theirs," — memorable words, the more
memorable that a literary life of sixty years was
in keeping with them.

It would be instructive to know what were
Wordsworth's studies during his winter in Gos-
lar. De Quincey's statement is mere conjecture.
It may be guessed fairly enough that he would
seek an entrance to the German language by the
easy path of the ballad, a course likely to con
firm him in his theories as to the language of
poetry. The Spinozism with which he has been
not unjustly charged was certainly not due to
any German influence, for it appears unmistak
ably in the " Lines composed at Tintern Ab
bey" in July, 1798. It is more likely to have
been derived from his talks with Coleridge in
1797.' When Emerson visited him in 1833, he

1 A very improbable story of Coleridge* s in the Biographia
Literaria represents the two friends as having incurred a sus
picion of treasonable dealings with the French enemy by their
constant references to a certain " Spy Nosey.'* The story at

WORDSWORTH 203

spoke with loathing of " Wilhelm Meister," a
part of which he had read in Carlyle's transla
tion apparently. There was some affectation in
this, it should seem, for he had read Smollett.
On the whole, it may be fairly concluded that
the help of Germany in the development of his
genius may be reckoned as very small, though
there is certainly a marked resemblance both in
form and sentiment between some of his earlier
lyrics and those of Goethe. His poem of the
" Thorn," though vastly more imaginative, may
have been suggested by Burger's " Pfarrer's
Tochter von Taubenhain." The little grave
drei Spannen tang, in its conscientious measure
ment, certainly recalls a famous couplet in the
English poem.

After spending the winter at Goslar, Words
worth and his sister returned to England in the
spring of 1799, and settled at Grasmere in
Westmoreland. In 1800, the first edition of the
" Lyrical Ballads " being exhausted, it was re-
published with the addition of another volume,
Mr. Longman paying ^"100 for the copyright
of two editions. The book passed to a second
edition in 1802, and to a third in 1805.'

least seems to show how they pronounced the name, which
was exactly in accordance with the usage of the last genera
tion in New England.

1 Wordsworth found (as other original minds have since
done) a hearing in America sooner than in England. James

zo4 WORDSWORTH

Wordsworth sent a copy of it, with a manly
letter, to Mr. Fox, particularly recommending
to his attention the poems " Michael " and " The
Brothers," as displaying the strength and per
manence among a simple and rural population
of those domestic affections which were certain
to decay gradually under the influence of manu
factories and poor-houses. Mr. Fox wrote a
civil acknowledgment, saying that his favorites
among the poems were "Harry Gill," "We are
Seven," "The Mad Motherland "The Idiot,"
but that he was prepossessed against the use of
blank verse for simple subjects. Any political
significance in the poems he was apparently un
able to see. To this second edition Wordsworth
prefixed an argumentative Preface, in which he
nailed to the door of the cathedral of English
song the critical theses which he was to main
tain against all comers in his poetry and his life.
It was a new thing for an author to undertake
to show the goodness of his verses by the logic
and learning of his prose ; but Wordsworth car
ried to the reform of poetry all that fervor and
faith which had lost their political object, and it

Humphreys, a Philadelphia bookseller, was encouraged by a
sufficient list of subscribers to reprint the first edition of the
Lyrical Ballads. The second English edition, however, hav
ing been published before he had wholly completed his re
printing, was substantially followed in the first American,
which was published in 1802.

WORDSWORTH 205

is another proof of the sincerity and greatness
of his mind, and of that heroic simplicity which
is their concomitant, that he could do so calmly
what was sure to seem ludicrous to the greater
number of his readers. Fifty years have since
demonstrated that the true judgment of one man
outweighs any counterpoise of false judgment,
and that the faith of mankind is guided to a
man only by a well-founded faith in himself.
To this Defensio Wordsworth afterward added
a supplement, and the two form a treatise of
permanent value for philosophic statement and
decorous English. Their only ill effect has
been, that they have encouraged many otherwise
deserving young men to set a Sibylline value on
their verses in proportion as they were unsalable.
The strength of an argument for self-reliance
drawn from the example of a great man depends
wholly on the greatness of him who uses it;
such arguments being like coats of mail, which,
though they serve the strong against arrow-
flights and lance-thrusts, may only suffocate the
weak or sink him the sooner in the waters of
oblivion.

An advertisement prefixed to the " Lyrical
Ballads," as originally published in one volume,
warned the reader that " they were written chiefly
with a view to ascertain how far the language
of conversation in the middle and lower classes
of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic

2o6 WORDSWORTH

pleasure." In his Preface to the second edition,
in two volumes, Wordsworth already found him
self forced to shift his ground a little (perhaps
in deference to the wider view and finer sense
of Coleridge), and now says of the former vol
ume that " it was published as an experiment
which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascer
tain how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement
a selection of the real language of men in a state
of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that
quantity of pleasure may be imparted which a
poet may rationally endeavor to impart/' ' Here
is evidence of a retreat towards a safer position,
though Wordsworth seems to have remained
unconvinced at heart, and for many years longer
clung obstinately to the passages of bald prose
into which his original theory had betrayed him.
In 1815 his opinions had undergone a still further
change, and an assiduous study of the qualities
of his own mind and of his own poetic method
(the two subjects in which alone he was ever a
thorough scholar) had convinced him that poetry
was in no sense that appeal to the understand
ing which is implied by the words " rationally
endeavor to impart." In the preface of that
year he says, " The observations prefixed to
that portion of these volumes which was pub-

1 Some of the weightiest passages in this Preface, as it is
now printed, were inserted without notice of date in the edi
tion of 1 8 1 5 .

WORDSWORTH 207

lished many years ago under the title of c Lyr
ical Ballads ' have so little of special application
to the greater part of the present enlarged and
diversified collection, that they could not with
propriety stand as an introduction to it." It is
a pity that he could not have become an earlier
convert to Coleridge's pithy definition, that
"prose was words in their best order, and poetry
the best words in the best order." But idealiza
tion was something that Wordsworth was obliged
to learn painfully. Jt did not come to him nat
urally, as to Spenser and Shelley, and to Cole
ridge in his higher moods. Moreover, it was in
the too frequent choice of subjects incapable of
being idealized without a manifest jar between
theme and treatment that Wordsworth's great
mistake lay. For example, in " The Blind
Highland Boy " he had originally the follow
ing stanzas : —

" Strong is the current, but be mild,
Ye waves, and spare the hapless child!
If ye in anger fret or chafe,
A bee-hive would be ship as safe
As that in which he sails.

" But say, what was it ? Thought of fear!
Well may ye tremble when ye hear!
— A household tub like one of those
Which women use to wash their clothes,
This carried the blind boy. ' '

In endeavoring to get rid of the downright

2o8 WORDSWORTH

vulgarity of phrase in the last stanza, Words
worth invents an impossible tortoise-shell, and
thus robs his story of the reality which alone
gave it a living interest. Any extemporized raft
would have floated the boy down to immortal
ity. But Wordsworth never quite learned the
distinction between Fact, which suffocates the
Muse, and Truth, which is the very breath of
her nostrils. Study and self-culture did much
for him, but they never quite satisfied him that
he was capable of making a mistake. He yielded
silently to friendly remonstrance on certain
points, and gave up, for example, the ludicrous
exactness of

"I Ve measured it from side to side,
'Tis three feet long and two feet wide."

But I doubt if he was ever really convinced, and
to his dying day he could never quite shake off
that habit of over-minute detail which renders
the narratives of uncultivated people so tedious,
and sometimes so distasteful.1 " Simon Lee/'
after his latest revision, still contains verses like
these : —

1 " On my alluding to the line —

' Three feet long and two feet wide ' —

and confessing that I dared not read them aloud in company,
he said, 'They ought to be liked.' " (Crabb Robinson, gth
May, 1815.) His ordinary answer to criticisms was that he
considered the power to appreciate the passage criticised as a
test of the critic's capacity to judge of poetry at all.

WORDSWORTH 209

" And he is lean and he is sick;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swollen and thick;
His legs are thin and dry;

Few months of life he has in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell," —

which are not only prose, but bad prose, and
moreover guilty of the same fault for which
Wordsworth condemned Dr. Johnson's famous
parody on the ballad style, — that their "matter
is contemptible." The sonorousness of convic
tion with which Wordsworth sometimes gives
utterance to commonplaces of thought and triv
ialities of sentiment has a ludicrous effect on the
profane and even on the faithful in unguarded
moments. We are reminded of a passage in
" The Excursion " : —

" List ! I heard

From yon huge breast of rock a solemn bleat,
Sent forth as if it were the mountain* s voice "

In 1800 the friendship of Wordsworth with
Lamb began, and was thenceforward never in
terrupted. He continued to live at Grasmere,
conscientiously diligent in the composition of
poems, secure of finding the materials of glory
within and around him ; for his genius taught
him that inspiration is no product of a foreign
shore, and that no adventurer ever found it,

zio WORDSWORTH

though he wandered as long as Ulysses. Mean
while the appreciation of the best minds and
the gratitude of the purest hearts gradually
centred more and more towards him. In 1 802 he
made a short visit to France, in company with
Miss Wordsworth, and soon after his return to
England was married to Mary Hutchinson, on
the 4th of October of the same year. Of the
good fortune of this marriage no other proof
is needed than the purity and serenity of his
poems, and its record is to be sought nowhere
else.

On the 1 8th of June, 1803, his first child,
John, was born, and on the i4th of August of
the same year he set out with his sister on a foot
journey into Scotland. Coleridge was their com
panion during a part of this excursion, of which
Miss Wordsworth kept a full diary. In Scot
land he made the acquaintance of Scott, who
recited to him a part of the " Lay of the Last
Minstrel/' then in manuscript. The travellers
returned to Grasmere on the 25th of September.
It was during this year that Wordsworth's inti
macy with the excellent Sir George Beaumont
began. Sir George was an amateur painter of
considerable merit, and his friendship was un
doubtedly of service to Wordsworth in making
him familiar with the laws of a sister art and
thus contributing to enlarge the sympathies of
his criticism, the tendency of which was toward

WORDSWORTH 211

too great exclusiveness. Sir George Beaumont,
dying in 1827, did not forego his regard for
the poet, but contrived to hold his affection in
mortmain by the legacy of an annuity of^ioo,
to defray the charges of a yearly journey.

In March, 1 805, the poet's brother, John, lost
his life by the shipwreck of the Abergavenny
East-Indiaman, of which he was captain. He
was a man of great purity and integrity, and sac
rificed himself to his sense of duty by refusing
to leave the ship till it was impossible to save
him. Wordsworth was deeply attached to him,
and felt such grief at his death as only solitary
natures like his are capable of, though mitigated
by a sense of the heroism which was the cause
of it. The need of mental activity as affording
an outlet to intense emotion may account for
the great productiveness of this and the follow
ing year. He now completed " The Prelude,"
wrote " The Waggoner," and increased the
number of his smaller poems enough to fill two
volumes, which were published in 1807.

This collection, which contained some of the
most beautiful of his shorter pieces, and among
others the incomparable Odes to Duty and on
Immortality, did not reach a second edition till
1815. The reviewers had another laugh, and ri
val poets pillaged while they scoffed, particularly
Byron, among whose verses a bit of Wordsworth
showed as incongruously as a sacred vestment

212 WORDSWORTH

on the back of some buccaneering plunderer of
an abbey.1 There was a general combination to
put him down, but on the other hand there was
a powerful party in his favor, consisting of
William Wordsworth. He not only continued
in good heart himself, but, reversing the order
usual on such occasions, kept up the spirits of
his friends.2 Meanwhile the higher order of

1 Byron, then in his twentieth year, wrote a review of
these volumes, not, on the whole, unfair. Crabb Robinson is
reported as saying that Wordsworth was indignant at the
Edinburgh Review'* 3 attack on Hours of Idleness. " The
young man will do something if he goes on," he said.

2 The Rev. Dr. Wordsworth has encumbered the memory
of his uncle with two volumes of Memoirs, which for confused
dreariness are only matched by the Rev. Mark Noble's His
tory of the Protectorate House of Cromwell. It is a misfortune
that his materials were not put into the hands of Professor
Reed, whose notes to the American edition are among the
most valuable parts of it, as they certainly are the clearest.
The book contains, however, some valuable letters of Words
worth; and those relating to this part of his life should be
read by every student of his works, for the light they throw
upon the principles which governed him in the composition of
his poems. In a letter to Lady Beaumont (May 21, 1807)
he says, " Trouble not yourself upon their present reception;
of what moment is that compared with what I trust is their
destiny ! — to console the afflicted, to add sunshine to daylight
by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the
gracious of every age, to see, to think and feel, and therefore
to become more actively and securely virtuous; this is their
office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we
(that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in our graves.

WORDSWORTH 213

minds among his contemporaries had descried
and acknowledged him. They see their peer
over the mist and lower summits between.

" When Plinlimmon hath a cap,
Snowdon wots well of that. ' '

Wordsworth passed the winter of 1806—7 *n
a house of Sir George Beaumont's, at Coleorton
in Leicestershire, the cottage at Grasmere having
become too small for his increased family. On
his return to the Vale of Grasmere he rented the
house at Allan Bank, where he lived three years.
During this period he appears to have written
very little poetry, for which his biographer as
signs as a primary reason the smokiness of the
Allan Bank chimneys. This will hardly account
for the failure of the summer crop, especially as
Wordsworth composed chiefly in the open air.
It did not prevent him from writing a pamphlet
upon the Convention of Cintra, which was pub-

. . . To conclude, my ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz
[of hostile criticism] , and my flesh as insensible as iron to
these petty stings; and, after what I have said, I am sure
yours will be the same. I doubt not that you will share with
me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them
these little poems) will cooperate with the benign tendencies
in human nature and society wherever found; and that they
will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better,
and happier." Here is an odd reversal of the ordinary rela
tion between an unpopular poet and his little public of admir
ers; it is he who keeps up their spirits, and supplies them
with faith from his own inexhaustible cistern.

2i4 WORDSWORTH

lished too late to attract much attention, though
Lamb says that its effect upon him was like that
which one of Milton's tracts might have had
upon a contemporary.1 It was at Allan Bank
that Coleridge dictated " The Friend," and
Wordsworth contributed to it two essays, one
in answer to a letter of Mathetes2 (Professor
Wilson), and the other on Epitaphs, republished
in the Notes to " The Excursion." Here also
he wrote his " Description of the Scenery of the
Lakes." Perhaps a truer explanation of the
comparative silence of Wordsworth's Muse
during these years is to be found in the intense
interest which he took in current events, whose
variety, picturesqueness, and historical signifi
cance were enough to absorb all the energies of
his imagination.

In the spring of 1811 Wordsworth removed
to the Parsonage at Grasmere. Here he re
mained two years, and here he had his second
intimate experience of sorrow in the loss of two
of his children, Catharine and Thomas, one of
whom died 4th June, and the other ist Decem-

1 " Wordsworth's pamphlet will fail of producing any gen
eral effect, because the sentences are long and involved; and his
friend De Quincey, who corrected the press, has rendered
them more obscure by an unusual system of punctuation."
(Southey to Scott, 3Oth July, 1809.) The tract is, as
Southey hints, heavy.

2 The first essay in the third volume of the second edition.

WORDSWORTH 215

her, iSis.1 Early in 1813 he bought Rydal
Mount, and, having removed thither, changed
his abode no more during the rest of his life. In
March of this year he was appointed Distributor
of Stamps for the county of Westmoreland, an
office whose receipts rendered him independent,
and whose business he was able to do by deputy,
thus leaving him ample leisure for nobler duties.
De Quincey speaks of this appointment as an
instance of the remarkable good luck which
waited upon Wordsworth through his whole
life. In our view it is only another illustration
of that scripture which describes the righteous
as never forsaken. Good luck is the willing
handmaid of upright, energetic character, and
conscientious observance of duty. Wordsworth
owed his nomination to the friendly exertions
of the Earl of Lonsdale, who desired to atone
as far as might be for the injustice of the first
Earl, and who respected the honesty of the man
more than he appreciated the originality of the
poet.2 The Collectorship at Whitehaven (a

1 Wordsworth's children were, —

John, born i8th June, 1803, a clergyman.
Dorothy, born i6th August, 1804; died gth July, 1847.
Thomas, born i6th June, 1806; died ist December, 1812.
Catharine, born 6th September, 1 808 ; died 4th June, 1812.
William, born I2th May, 1810; succeeded his father as
Stamp-Distributor.

2 Good luck (in the sense of Chance} seems properly to
be the occurrence of Opportunity to one who has neither

216 WORDSWORTH

more lucrative office) was afterwards offered to
Wordsworth, and declined. He had enough for
independence, and wished nothing more. Still
later, on the death of the Stamp-Distributor for
Cumberland, a part of that district was annexed
to Westmoreland, and Wordsworth's income
was raised to something more than ^1000 a
year.

In 1814 he made his second tour in Scotland,
visiting Yarrow in company with the Ettrick
Shepherd. During this year " The Excursion "
was published, in an edition of five hundred
copies, which supplied the demand for six years.
Another edition of the same number of copies
was published in 1827, and not exhausted till
1834. In 1815 "The White Doe of Rylstone "
appeared, and in 1 8 1 6 " A Letter to a Friend
of Burns," in which Wordsworth gives his
opinion upon the limits to be observed by the
biographers of literary men. It contains many
valuable suggestions, but allows hardly scope
enough for personal details, to which he was
constitutionally indifferent.1 Nearly the same

deserved nor knows how to use it. In such hands it commonly
turns to ill luck. Moore's Bermudan appointment is an in
stance of it. Wordsworth had a sound common sense and
practical conscientiousness, which enabled him to fill his office
as well as Dr. Franklin could have done. A fitter man could
not have been found in Westmoreland.

1 "I am not one who much or oft delight
In personal talk."

WORDSWORTH 217

date may be ascribed to a rhymed translation of
the first three books of the "^neid," a specimen
of which was printed in the Cambridge " Phi
lological Museum" (1832). In 1819 "Peter
Bell/' written twenty years before, was published,
and, perhaps in consequence of the ridicule of
the reviewers, found a more rapid sale than any
of his previous volumes. " The Waggoner,"
printed in the same year, was less successful.
His next publication was the volume of Sonnets
on the river Duddon, with some miscellaneous
poems, 1820. A tour on the Continent in 1820
furnished the subjects for another collection, pub
lished in 1822. This was followed in the same
year by the volume of "Ecclesiastical Sketches."
His subsequent publications were "Yarrow Re
visited," 1835, and the tragedy of " The Bor
derers," 1842.

During all these years his fame was increasing
slowly but steadily, and his age gathered to itself
the reverence and the troops of friends which
his poems and the nobly simple life reflected in
them deserved. Public honors followed private
appreciation. In 1838 the University of Dublin
conferred upon him the degree of D. C. L.
In 1839 Oxford did the same, and the reception
of the poet (now in his seventieth year) at the
University was enthusiastic. In 1842 he resigned
his office of Stamp-Distributor, and Sir Rob
ert Peel had the honor of putting him upon

zi8 WORDSWORTH

the civil list for a pension of ^300. In 1843
he was appointed Laureate, with the express
understanding that it was a tribute of respect,
involving no duties except such as might be
self-imposed. His only official production was
an Ode for the installation of Prince Albert as
Chancellor of the University of Cambridge.
His life was prolonged yet seven years, almost,
it should seem, that he might receive that
honor which he had truly conquered for himself
by the unflinching bravery of a literary life of
half a century, unparalleled for the scorn with
which its labors were received, and the victo
rious acknowledgment which at last crowned
them. Surviving nearly all his contemporaries,
he had, if ever any man had, a foretaste of
immortality, enjoying in a sort his own post
humous renown, for the hardy slowness of its
growth gave a safe pledge of its durability. He
died on the 23d of April, 1850, the anniversary
of the death of Shakespeare.

We have thus briefly sketched the life of
Wordsworth, — a life uneventful even for a man
of letters ; a life like that of an oak, of quiet
self-development, throwing out stronger roots
toward the side whence the prevailing storm-
blasts blow, and a tougher fibre in proportion
to the rocky nature of the soil in which it grows.
The life and growth of his mind, and the influ
ences which shaped it, are to be looked for, even

WORDSWORTH 219

more than is the case with most poets, in his
works, for he deliberately recorded them there.

Of his personal characteristics little is related.
He was somewhat above the middle height, but,
according to De Quincey, of indifferent figure,
the shoulders being narrow and drooping. His
finest feature was the eye, which was gray and
full of spiritual light. Leigh Hunt says : " I
never beheld eyes that looked so inspired, so
supernatural. They were like fires, half burn
ing, half smouldering, with a sort of acrid fix
ture of regard. One might imagine Ezekiel or
Isaiah to have had such eyes." Southey tells us
that he had no sense of smell, and Haydon that
he had none of form. The best likeness of him,
in De Quincey's judgment, is the portrait of
Milton prefixed to Richardson's notes on " Par
adise Lost." He was active in his habits, com
posing in the open air, and generally dictating
his poems. His daily life was regular, simple,
and frugal ; his manners were dignified and
kindly ; and in his letters and recorded conver
sations it is remarkable how little that was
personal entered into his judgment of contem
poraries.

The true rank of Wordsworth among poets
is, perhaps, not even yet to be fairly estimated,
so hard is it to escape into the quiet hall of
judgment uninflamed by the tumult of parti
sanship which besets the doors.

220 WORDSWORTH

Coming to manhood, predetermined to be a
great poet, at a time when the artificial school
of poetry was enthroned with all the authority
of long succession and undisputed legitimacy,
it was almost inevitable that Wordsworth, who,
both by nature and judgment, was a rebel against
the existing order, should become a partisan.
Unfortunately, he became not only the partisan
of a system, but of William Wordsworth as its
representative. Right in general principle, he
thus necessarily became wrong in particulars.
Justly convinced that greatness only achieves
its ends by implicitly obeying its own instincts,
he perhaps reduced the following his instincts
too much to a system, mistook his own resent
ments for the promptings of his natural genius,
and, compelling principle to the measure of his
own temperament or even of the controversial
exigency of the moment, fell sometimes into the
error of making naturalness itself artificial. If
a poet resolve to be original, it will end com
monly in his being merely peculiar.

Wordsworth himself departed more and more
in practice, as he grew older, from the theories
which he had laid down in his prefaces ; ' but

1 How far he swung backward toward the school under
whose influence he grew up, and toward the style against
which he had protested so vigorously, a few examples will
show. The advocate of the language of common life has a
verse in his Thanksgiving Ode which, if one met with it by

WORDSWORTH 221

those theories undoubtedly had a great effect in
retarding the growth of his fame. He had care
fully constructed a pair of spectacles through
which his earlier poems were to be studied, and
the public insisted on looking through them at
his mature works, and were consequently unable
to see fairly what required a different focus. He
forced his readers to come to his poetry with a
certain amount of conscious preparation, and
thus gave them beforehand the impression of
something like mechanical artifice, and deprived
them of the contented repose of implicit faith.
To the child a watch seems to be a living crea
ture ; but Wordsworth would not let his read
ers be children, and did injustice to himself by
giving them an uneasy doubt whether creations

itself, he would think the achievement of some later copyist
of Pope: —

" While the tubed engine [the organ] feels the inspiring blast."
And in The Italian Itinerant and the Swiss Goatherd we
find a thermometer or barometer called

' ' The well-wrought scale
Whose sentient tube instructs to time
A purpose to a fickle clime."

Still worse in the Eclipse of the Sun, 1821: —

" High on her speculative tower
Stood Science, waiting for the hour
When Sol was destined to endure
That darkening."

So in The Excursion, —

1 The cold March wind raised in her tender throat
Viewless obstructions."

222 WORDSWORTH

which really throbbed with the very heart's-
blood of genius, and were alive with Nature's
life of life, were not contrivances of wheels and
springs. A naturalness which we are told to ex
pect has lost the crowning grace of Nature. The
men who walked in Cornelius Agrippa's vision
ary gardens had probably no more pleasurable
emotion than that of a shallow wonder, or an
equally shallow self-satisfaction in thinking they
had hit upon the secret of the thaumaturgy ; but
to a tree that has grown as God willed we come
without a theory and with no botanical predilec
tions, enjoying it simply and thankfully; or the
Imagination re-creates for us its past summers
and winters, the birds that have nested and sung
in it, the sheep that have clustered in its shade,
the winds that have visited it, the cloudbergs
that have drifted over it, and the snows that
have ermined it in winter. The Imagination
is a faculty that flouts at foreordination, and
Wordsworth seemed to do all he could to cheat
his readers of her company by laying out paths
with a peremptory Do not step off the gravel ! at
the opening of each, and preparing pitfalls for
every conceivable emotion, with guide-boards to
tell each when and where it must be caught.

But if these things stood in the way of im
mediate appreciation, he had another theory
which interferes more seriously with the total
and permanent effect of his poems. He was

WORDSWORTH 223

theoretically determined not only to be a philo
sophic poet, but to be a great philosophic poet,
and to this end he must produce an epic. Leav
ing aside the question whether the epic be
obsolete or not, it may be doubted whether
the history of a single man's mind is universal
enough in its interest to furnish all the require
ments of the epic machinery, and it may be more
than doubted whether a poet's philosophy be
ordinary metaphysics, divisible into chapter and
section. It is rather something which is more
energetic in a word than in a whole treatise, and
our hearts unclose themselves instinctively at its
simple Open sesame ! while they would stand
firm against the reading of the whole body of
philosophy. In point of fact, the one element
of greatness which " The Excursion " possesses
indisputably is heaviness. It is only the epi
sodes that are universally read, and the effect
of these is diluted by the connecting and accom
panying lectures on metaphysics. Wordsworth
had his epic mould to fill, and, like Benvenuto
Cellini in casting his Perseus, was forced to
throw in everything, debasing the metal lest it
should run short. Separated from the rest, the
episodes are perfect poems in their kind, and
without example in the language.

Wordsworth, like most solitary men of strong
minds, was a good critic of the substance of
poetry, but somewhat niggardly in the allow-

224 WORDSWORTH

ance he made for those subsidiary qualities
which make it the charmer of leisure and the
employment of minds without definite object.
It may be doubted, indeed, whether he set much
store by any contemporary writing but his own,
and whether he did not look upon poetry too
exclusively as an exercise rather of the intellect
than as a nepenthe of the imagination.1 He
says of himself, speaking of his youth: —

"In fine,

I was a better judge of thoughts than words,
Misled in estimating words, not only
By common inexperience of youth,
But by the trade in classic niceties,
The dangerous craft of culling term and phrase
From languages that want the living voice
To carry meaning to the natural heart;
To tell us what is passion, what is truth,
What reason, what simplicity and sense." 2

Though he here speaks in the preterite tense,
this was always true of him, and his thought
seems often to lean upon a word too weak to
bear its weight. No reader of adequate insight
can help regretting that he did not earlier give
himself to " the trade of classic niceties/' It was
precisely this which gives to the blank verse of
Landor the severe dignity and reserved force
which alone among later poets recall the tune

1 According to Landor, he pronounced all Scott's poetry to
be "not worth five shillings."

2 Prelude, bk. iv.

WORDSWORTH 225

of Milton, and to which Wordsworth never
attained. Indeed, Wordsworth's blank verse
(though the passion be profounder) is always
essentially that of Cowper. They were alike
also in their love of outward nature and of simple
things. The main difference between them is
one of scenery rather than of sentiment, between
the lifelong familiar of the mountains and the
dweller on the plain.

It cannot be denied that in Wordsworth the
very highest powers of the poetic mind were
associated with a certain tendency to the diffuse
and commonplace. It is in the understanding
(always prosaic) that the great golden veins of
his imagination are embedded.1 He wrote too
much to write always well ; for it is not a great
Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek
ten thousand, that march safely down to poster
ity. He set tasks to his divine faculty, which is
much the same as trying to make Jove's eagle
do the service of a clucking hen. Throughout
" The Prelude " and " The Excursion " he seems

1 This was instinctively felt, even by his admirers. Miss
Martineau said to Crabb Robinson in 1839, speaking of
Wordsworth's conversation: " Sometimes he is annoying from
the pertinacity with which he dwells on trifles; at other times
he flows on in the utmost grandeur, leaving a strong impression
of inspiration." Robinson tells us that he read Resolution and
Independence to a lady who was affected by it even to tears,
and then said, " I have not heard anything for years that so
much delighted me; but, after all, it is not poetry."
v

226 WORDSWORTH

striving to bind the wizard Imagination with the
sand-ropes of dry disquisition, and to have for
gotten the potent spell-word which would make
the particles cohere. There is an arenaceous
quality in the style which makes progress weari
some. Yet with what splendors as of mountain
sunsets are we rewarded ! what golden rounds
of verse do we not see stretching heavenward
with angels ascending and descending ! what
haunting harmonies hover around us deep and
eternal like the undying barytone of the sea ! and
if we are compelled to fare through sands and
desert wildernesses, how often do we not hear
airy shapes that syllable our names with a start
ling personal appeal to our highest consciousness
and our noblest aspiration, such as we wait for
in vain in any other poet ! Landor, in a letter
to Miss Holford, says admirably of him, " Com
mon minds alone can be ignorant what breadth
of philosophy, what energy and intensity of
thought, what insight into the heart, and what
observation of Nature are requisite for the pro
duction of such poetry."

Take from Wordsworth all which an honest
criticism cannot but allow, and what is left will
show how truly great he was. He had no hu
mor, no dramatic power, and his temperament
was of that dry and juiceless quality, that in all
his published correspondence you shall not find
a letter, but only essays. If we consider care-

WORDSWORTH 227

fully where he was most successful, we shall find
that it was not so much in description of natural
scenery, or delineation of character, as in vivid
expression of the effect produced by external
objects and events upon his own mind, and of
the shape and hue (perhaps momentary) which
they in turn took from his mood or tempera
ment. His finest passages are always mono
logues. He had a fondness for particulars, and
there are parts of his poems which remind us
of local histories in the undue relative impor
tance given to trivial matters. He was the
historian of Wordsworthshire. This power of
particularization (for it is as truly a power as
generalization) is what gives such vigor and
greatness to single lines and sentiments of
Wordsworth, and to poems developing a single
thought or sentiment. It was this that made
him so fond of the sonnet. That sequestered
nook forced upon him the limits which his
fecundity (if I may not say his garrulity) was
never self-denying enough to impose on itself.
It suits his solitary and meditative temper, and
it was there that Lamb (an admirable judge of
what was permanent in literature) liked him best.
Its narrow bounds, but fourteen paces from end
to end, turn into a virtue his too common fault
of giving undue prominence to every passing
emotion. He excels in monologue, and the law
of the sonnet tempers monologue with mercy.

228 WORDSWORTH

In " The Excursion " we are driven to the sub
terfuge of a French verdict of extenuating cir
cumstances. His mind had not that reach and
elemental movement of Milton's, which, like the
trade-wind, gathered to itself thoughts and im
ages like stately fleets from every quarter ; some
deep with silks and spicery, some brooding over
the silent thunders of their battailous armaments,
but all swept forward in their destined track,
over the long billows of his verse, every inch of
canvas strained by the unifying breath of their
common epic impulse. It was an organ that
Milton mastered, mighty in compass, capable
equally of the trumpet's ardors or the slim deli
cacy of the flute, and sometimes it bursts forth
in great crashes through his prose, as if he
touched it for solace in the intervals of his toil.
If Wordsworth sometimes put the trumpet to
his lips, yet he lays it aside soon and willingly
for his appropriate instrument, the pastoral reed.
And it is not one that grew by any vulgar stream,
but that which Apollo breathed through, tend
ing the flocks of Admetus, — that which Pan
endowed with every melody of the visible uni
verse, — the same in which the soul of the de
spairing nymph took refuge and gifted with her
dual nature, — so that ever and anon, amid the
notes of human joy or sorrow, there comes sud
denly a deeper and almost awful tone, thrilling
us into dim consciousness of a forgotten divinity.

WORDSWORTH 229

Wordsworth's absolute want of humor, while
it no doubt confirmed his self-confidence by
making him insensible both to the comical in
congruity into which he was often led by his
earlier theory concerning the language of poetry
and to the not unnatural ridicule called forth by
it, seems to have been indicative of a certain
dulness of perception in other directions.1 We

1 Nowhere is this displayed with more comic self-compla
cency than when he thought it needful to rewrite the ballad of
Helen of Kirconnel, — a poem hardly to be matched in any
language for swiftness of movement and savage sincerity of
feeling. Its shuddering compression is masterly.

" Curst be the heart that thought the thought,
And curst the hand that fired the shot,
When in my arms burd Helen dropt,
That died to succor me !

" O, think ye not my heart was sair

When my love dropt down and spake na mair ? "

Compare this with —

" Proud Gordon cannot bear the thoughts
That through his brain are travelling,
And, starting up, to Bruce's heart
He launched a deadly javelin;

Fair Ellen saw it when it came,
And, stepping forth to meet the same,
Did with her body cover
The Youth, her chosen lover.

And Bruce (as soon as he had slain
The Gordon') sailed away to Spain,
And fought with rage incessant
Against the Moorish Crescent."

These are surely the verses of an attorney's clerk «« penning
a stanza when he should engross." It will be noticed that

230 WORDSWORTH

cannot help feeling that the material of his na
ture was essentially prose, which, in his inspired
moments, he had the power of transmuting, but
which, whenever the inspiration failed or was
factitious, remained obstinately leaden. The
normal condition of many poets would seem to
approach that temperature to which Words
worth's mind could be raised only by the white
heat of profoundly inward passion. And in
proportion to the intensity needful to make his

Wordsworth here also departs from his earlier theory of the
language of poetry by substituting a javelin for a bullet as less
modern and familiar. Had he written —

" And Gordon never gave a hint,

But, having somewhat picked his flint,

Let fly the fatal bullet

That killed that lovely pullet," —

it would hardly have seemed more like a parody than the rest.
He shows the same insensibility in a note upon the Ancient
Mariner in the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads: f< The
poem of my friend has indeed great defects; first, that the
principal person has no distinct character, either in his profes
sion of mariner, or as a human being who, having been long
under the control of supernatural impressions, might be sup
posed himself to partake of something supernatural; secondly,
that he does not act, but is continually acted upon; thirdly,
that the events, having no necessary connection, do not pro
duce each other; and lastly, that the imagery is somewhat
laboriously accumulated." Here is an indictment, to be sure,
and drawn, plainly enough, by the attorney's clerk afore
named. One would think that the strange charm of Coleridge' s
most truly original poems lay in this very emancipation from
the laws of cause and effect.

WORDSWORTH 231

nature thoroughly aglow is the very high quality
of his best verses. They seem rather the pro
ductions of Nature than of man, and have the
lastingness of such, delighting our age with the
same startle of newness and beauty that pleased
our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shift
ing inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling ?
It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns.
He seems to have caught and fixed forever
in immutable grace the most evanescent and
intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-
marks on the remotest shores of being. But this
intensity of mood which insures high quality is
by its very nature incapable of prolongation,
and Wordsworth, in endeavoring it, falls more
below himself, and is, more even than many
poets his inferiors in imaginative quality, a poet
of passages. Indeed, one cannot help having
the feeling sometimes that the poem is there
for the sake of these passages, rather than that
these are the natural jets and elations of a mind
energized by the rapidity of its own motion.
In other words, the happy couplet or gracious
image seems not to spring from the inspiration
of the poem conceived as a whole, but rather to
have dropped of itself into the mind of the poet
in one of his rambles, who then, in a less rapt
mood, has patiently built up around it a setting
of verse too often ungraceful in form and of a
material whose cheapness may cast a doubt on

232 WORDSWORTH

the priceless quality of the gem it encumbers.1
During the most happily productive period of
his life, Wordsworth was impatient of what may
be called the mechanical portion of his art. His
wife and sister seem from the first to have been
his scribes. In later years, he had learned and
often insisted on the truth that poetry was an
art no less than a gift, and corrected his poems
in cold blood, sometimes to their detriment.
But he certainly had more of the vision than of
the faculty divine, and was always a little numb
on the side of form and proportion. Perhaps
his best poem in these respects is the " Lao-
damia," and it is not uninstructive to learn from
his own lips that " it cost him more trouble
than almost anything of equal length he had
ever written." His longer poems (miscalled
epical) have no more intimate bond of union
than their more or less immediate relation to
his own personality. Of character other than
his own he had but a faint conception, and all
the personages of " The Excursion " that are
not Wordsworth are the merest shadows of
himself upon mist, for his self-concentrated

1 "A hundred times when, roving high and low,
I have been harassed with the toil of verse,
Much pains and little progress, and at once
Some lovely Image in the song rose up,
Full-formed, like Venus rising from the sea."

Prelude, bk. iv.

WORDSWORTH 233

nature was incapable of projecting itself into
the consciousness of other men and seeing the
springs of action at their source in the recesses
of individual character. The best parts of these
longer poems are bursts of impassioned solilo
quy, and his fingers were always clumsy at the
callida junctura. The stream of narration is
sluggish, if varied by times with pleasing reflec
tions (viridesque placido aequore sylvas) ; we are
forced to do our own rowing, and only when
the current is hemmed in by some narrow gorge
of the poet's personal consciousness do we feel
ourselves snatched along on the smooth but
impetuous rush of unmistakable inspiration.
The fact that what is precious in Wordsworth's
poetry was (more truly even than with some
greater poets than he) a gift rather than an achieve
ment should always be borne in mind in taking
the measure of his power. I know not whether
to call it height or depth, this peculiarity of his,
but it certainly endows those parts of his work
which we should distinguish as Wordsworthian
with an unexpectedness and impressiveness of
originality such as we feel in the presence of
Nature herself. He seems to have been half
conscious of this, and recited his own poems to
all comers with an enthusiasm of wondering
admiration that would have been profoundly
comic x but for its simple sincerity and for the
1 Mr. Emerson tells us that he was at first tempted to smile,

234 WORDSWORTH

fact that William Wordsworth, Esquire, of
Rydal Mount, was one person, and the William
Wordsworth whom he so heartily reverenced
quite another. We recognize two voices in him,
as Stephano did in Caliban. There are Jeremiah
and his scribe Baruch. If the prophet cease from
dictating, the amanuensis, rather than be idle,
employs his pen in jotting down some anecdotes
of his master, how he one day went out and
saw an old woman, and the next day did not,
and so came home and dictated some verses on
this ominous phenomenon, and how another
day he saw a cow. These marginal annotations
have been carelessly taken up into the text, have
been religiously held by the pious to be ortho
dox scripture, and by dexterous exegesis have
been made to yield deeply oracular meanings.
Presently the real prophet takes up the word
again and speaks as one divinely inspired, the
Voice of a higher and invisible power. Words
worth's better utterances have the bare sincerity,
the absolute abstraction from time and place, the
immunity from decay, that belong to the grand
simplicities of the Bible. They seem not more
his own than ours and every man's, the word

and Mr. Ellis Yarnall (who saw him in his eightieth year)
says, " These quotations [from his own works] he read in a
way that much impressed me; it seemed almost as if he were
awe d by the greatness of his own power, the gifts with which
he had been endowed" (The italics are mine.)

WORDSWORTH 235

of the inalterable Mind. This gift of his was
naturally very much a matter of temperament,
and accordingly by far the greater part of his
finer product belongs to the period of his prime,
ere Time had set his lumpish foot on the pedal
that deadens the nerves of animal sensibility.1
He did not grow as those poets do in whom the
artistic sense is predominant. One of the most
delightful fancies of the Genevese humorist,
Toepffer, is the poet Albert, who, having had
his portrait drawn by a highly idealizing hand,
does his best afterwards to look like it. Many
of Wordsworth's later poems seem like rather
unsuccessful efforts to resemble his former self.
They would never, as Sir John Harrington says

1 His best poetry was written when he was under the im
mediate influence of Coleridge. Coleridge seems to have felt
this, for it is evidently to Wordsworth that he alludes when
he speaks of " those who have been so well pleased that I
should, year after year, flow with a hundred nameless rills
into their main stream." {Letters, Conversations, and Re
collections of S. T. C., vol. i. pp. 5, 6.) " Wordsworth
found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the
participles in Shakespeare's line about bees: —

" ' The singing masons building roofs of gold.'

This, he said, was a line that Milton never would have written.
Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in har
mony with the continued note of the singers . ' ' ( Leigh Hunt' s
Autobiography. ) Wordsworth writes to Crabb Robinson in
1837, " My ear is susceptible to the clashing of sounds almost
to disease." One cannot help thinking that his training in
these niceties was begun by Coleridge.

236 WORDSWORTH

of poetry, " keep a child from play and an old
man from the chimney-corner." '

Chief Justice Marshall once blandly inter
rupted a junior counsel who was arguing certain
obvious points of law at needless length, by say
ing, " Brother Jones, there are some things which
a Supreme Court of the United States sitting in
equity may be presumed to know." Wordsworth
has this fault of enforcing and restating obvious
points till the reader feels as if his own intelli
gence were somewhat underrated. He is over-
conscientious in giving us full measure, and once
profoundly absorbed in the sound of his own
voice, he knows not when to stop. If he feel
himself flagging, he has a droll way of keeping
the floor, as it were, by asking himself a series
of questions sometimes not needing, and often
incapable of answer. There are three stanzas of
such near the close of the First Part of " Peter
Bell," where Peter first catches a glimpse of the
dead body in the water, all happily incongruous,
and ending with one which reaches the height
of comicality : —

" Is it a fiend that to a stake
Of fire his desperate self is tethering ?
Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell,
In solitary ward or cell,
Ten thousand miles from all his brethren ? "

The same want of humor which made him
1 In the Preface to his translation of the Orlando Furioso.

WORDSWORTH 237

insensible to incongruity may perhaps account
also for the singular unconsciousness of dispro
portion which so often strikes us in his poetry.
For example, a little farther on in " Peter Bell "
we find : —

" Now — like a tempest-shattered bark
That overwhelmed and prostrate lies,
And in a moment to the verge
Is lifted of a foaming surge —
Full suddenly the Ass doth rise! "

And one cannot help thinking that the similes
of the huge stone, the sea-beast, and the cloud,
noble as they are in themselves, are somewhat
too lofty for the service to which they are put.1
The movement of Wordsworth's mind was
too slow and his mood too meditative for nar
rative poetry. He values his own thoughts and
reflections too much to sacrifice the least of them
to the interests of his story. Moreover, it is
never action that interests him, but the subtle
motives that lead to or hinder it. " The Wag
goner" involuntarily suggests a comparison with
" Tam O'Shanter " infinitely to its own disad
vantage. " Peter Bell," full though it be of pro
found touches and subtle analysis, is lumbering
and disjointed. Even Lamb was forced to con
fess that he did not like it. " The White Doe,"
the most Wordsworthian of them all in the best
meaning of the epithet, is also only the more
1 In Resolution and Independence.

238 WORDSWORTH

truly so for being diffuse and reluctant. What
charms in Wordsworth and will charm forever
is the

" Happy tone

Of meditation slipping in between
The beauty coming and the beauty gone."

A few poets, in the exquisite adaptation of their
words to the tune of our own feelings and fan
cies, in the charm of their manner, indefinable
as the sympathetic grace of woman, are every
thing to us without our being able to say that
they are much in themselves. They rather nar
cotize than fortify. Wordsworth must subject
our mood to his own before he admits us to his
intimacy ; but, once admitted, it is for life, and
we find ourselves in his debt, not for what he
has been to us in our hours of relaxation, but
for what he has done for us as a reinforcement of
faltering purpose and personal independence
of character. His system of a Nature-cure, first
professed by Dr. Jean Jacques and continued by
Cowper, certainly breaks down as a whole. The
Solitary of " The Excursion," who has not been
cured of his scepticism by living among the
medicinal mountains, is, so far as we can see,
equally proof against the lectures of Pedler and
Parson. Wordsworth apparently felt that this
would be so, and accordingly never saw his way
clear to finishing the poem. But the treatment,
whether a panacea or not, is certainly whole-

WORDSWORTH 239

some, inasmuch as it inculcates abstinence, ex
ercise, and uncontaminate air. I am not sure,
indeed, that the Nature-cure theory does not
tend to foster in constitutions less vigorous than
Wordsworth's what Milton would call a fugi
tive and cloistered virtue at a dear expense of
manlier qualities. The ancients and our own
Elizabethans, ere spiritual megrims had become
fashionable, perhaps made more out of life by
taking a frank delight in its action and passion
and by grappling with the facts of this world,
rather than muddling themselves over the in
soluble problems of another. If they had not
discovered the picturesque, as we understand it,
they found surprisingly fine scenery in man and
his destiny, and would have seen something
ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle
of a grown man running to hide his head in
the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever he
had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the
tussle for existence.

But when, as I have said, our impartiality has
made all those qualifications and deductions
against which even the greatest poet may not
plead his privilege, what is left to Wordsworth
is enough to justify his fame. Even where his
genius is wrapped in clouds, the unconquerable
lightning of imagination struggles through, flash
ing out unexpected vistas, and illuminating the
humdrum pathway of our daily thought with a

z4o WORDSWORTH

radiance of momentary consciousness that seems
like a revelation. If it be the most delightful
function of the poet to set our lives to music,
yet perhaps he will be even more sure of our
maturer gratitude if he do his part also as mor
alist and philosopher to purify and enlighten ;
if he define and encourage our vacillating per
ceptions of duty ; if he piece together our frag
mentary apprehensions of our own life and that
larger life whose unconscious instruments we
are, making of the jumbled bits of our dissected
map of experience a coherent chart. In the great
poets there is an exquisite sensibility both of
soul and sense that sympathizes like gossamer
sea-moss with every movement of the element
in which it floats, but which is rooted on the
solid rock of our common sympathies. Words
worth shows less of this finer feminine fibre of
organization than one or two of his contempo
raries, notably than Coleridge or Shelley ; but
he was a masculine thinker, and in his more
characteristic poems there is always a kernel of
firm conclusion from far-reaching principles that
stimulates thought and challenges meditation.
Groping in the dark passages of life, we come
upon some axiom of his, as it were a wall that
gives us our bearings and enables us to find
an outlet. Compared with Goethe we feel that
he lacks that serene impartiality of mind which
results from breadth of culture ; nay, he seems

WORDSWORTH 241

narrow, insular, almost provincial. He reminds
us of those saints of Dante who gather bright
ness by revolving on their own axis. But through
this very limitation of range he gains perhaps
in intensity and the impressiveness which re
sults from eagerness of personal conviction. If
we read Wordsworth through, as I have just
done, we find ourselves changing our mind about
him at every other page, so uneven is he. If
we read our favorite poems or passages only, he
will seem uniformly great. And even as regards
" The Excursion " we should remember how few
long poems will bear consecutive reading. For
my part I know of but one, — the " Odyssey."
None of our great poets can be called pop
ular in any exact sense of the word, for the
highest poetry deals with thoughts and emotions
which inhabit, like rarest sea-mosses, the doubt
ful limits of that shore between our abiding
divine and our fluctuating human nature, rooted
in the one, but living in the other, seldom laid
bare, and otherwise visible only at exceptional
moments of entire calm and clearness. Of no
other poet except Shakespeare have so many
phrases become household words as of Words
worth. If Pope has made current more epigrams
of worldly wisdom, to Wordsworth belongs the
nobler praise of having defined for us, and given
us for a daily possession, those faint and vague
suggestions of other-worldliness of whose gentle

242 WORDSWORTH

ministry with our baser nature the hurry and
bustle of life scarcely ever allowed us to be
conscious. He has won for himself a secure
immortality by a depth of intuition which makes
only the best minds at their best hours worthy,
or indeed capable, of his companionship, and
by a homely sincerity of human sympathy
which reaches the humblest heart. Our language
owes him gratitude for the habitual purity and
abstinence of his style, and we who speak it,
for having emboldened us to take delight in
simple things, and to trust ourselves to our own
instincts. And he hath his reward. It needs
not to bid

" Renowned Spenser, lie a thought more nigh
To learned Chaucer, and rare Beaumond lie
A little nearer Spenser ' * ; —

for there is no fear of crowding in that little
society with whom he is now enrolled as fifth in
the succession of the great English Poets.

MILTON

MILTON I

1872

IF the biographies of literary men are to as
sume the bulk which Mr. Masson is giv
ing to that of Milton, their authors should
send a phial of elixir vitae with the first vol
ume, that a purchaser might have some valid
assurance of surviving to see the last. Mr.
Masson has already occupied thirteen hundred
and seventy-eight pages in getting Milton to
his thirty-fifth year, and an interval of eleven
years stretches between the dates of the first
and second instalments of his published la
bors. As Milton's literary life properly begins at
twenty-one, with the " Ode on the Nativity,"

1 The Life of John Milton : narrated in Connection with
the Political, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of his Time.
By David Masson, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Rhetoric and
English Literature in the University of Edinburgh. Vols. i., ii.
1638-1643. London and New York: Macmillan & Co.
1871. 8vo. pp. xii, 608.

The Poetical Works of John Milton, edited, with Intro
duction, Notes, and an Essay on Milton's English, by David
Masson, M. A., LL. D., Professor of Rhetoric and English
Literature in the University of Edinburgh. 3 vols. 8vo.
Macmillan & Co. 1874.

246 MILTON

and as by far the more important part of it lies
between the year at which we are arrived and
his death at the age of sixty-six, we might seem
to have the terms given us by which to make
a rough reckoning of how soon we are likely
to see land. But when we recollect the baffling
character of the winds and currents we have
already encountered, and the eddies that may
at any time slip us back to the reformation in
Scotland or the settlement of New England;
when we consider, moreover, that Milton's life
overlapped the grand siecle of French literature,
with its irresistible temptations to digression and
homily for a man of Mr. Masson's tempera
ment, we may be pardoned if a sigh of doubt
and discouragement escape us. We envy the
secular leisures of Methuselah, and are thankful
that his biography at least (if written in the same
longeval proportion) is irrecoverably lost to us.
What a subject would that have been for a
person of Mr. Masson's spacious predilections !
Even if he himself can count on patriarchal
prorogations of existence, let him hang a print
of the Countess of Desmond in his study to
remind him of the ambushes which Fate lays
for the toughest of us. For myself, I have not
dared to climb a cherry-tree since I began to
read his work. Even with the promise of a
speedy third volume before me, I feel by no
means sure of living to see Mary Powell back in

MILTON 247

her husband's house ; for it is just at this crisis
that Mr. Masson, with the diabolical art of a
practised serial writer, leaves us while he goes
into an exhaustive account of the Westminster
Assembly and the political and religious notions
of the Massachusetts Puritans. One could not
help thinking, after having got Milton fairly
through college, that he was never more mistaken
in his life than when he wrote

" How soon hath Time, that subtle thief of youth,
Stolen on his wing my three-and-twentieth year ! ' *

Or is it Mr. Masson who has scotched Time's
wheels ?

It is plain from the Preface to the second
volume that Mr. Masson himself has an uneasy
consciousness that something is wrong, and that
Milton ought somehow to be more than a mere
incident of his own biography. He tells us that,
" whatever may be thought by a hasty person
looking in on the subject from the outside, no
one can study the life of Milton as it ought
to be studied without being obliged to study
extensively and intimately the contemporary
history of England, and even incidentally of
Scotland and Ireland too. . . . Thus on the
very compulsion, or at least the suasion, of the
biography, a history grew on my hands. It was
not in human nature to confine the historical
inquiries, once they were in progress, within the
precise limits of their demonstrable bearing on

248 MILTON

the biography, even had it been possible to
determine these limits beforehand ; and so the
history assumed a coordinate importance with
me, was pursued often for its own sake, and
became, though always with a sense of organic
relation to the biography, continuous in itself."
If a " hasty person " be one who thinks eleven
years rather long to have his button held by a
biographer ere he begin his next sentence, I take
to myself the sting of Mr. Masson's covert sar
casm. I confess with shame a pusillanimity that
is apt to flag if a " to be continued" do not re
deem its promise before the lapse of a quinquen
nium. I could scarce await the " Autocrat "
himself so long. The heroic age of literature is
past, and even a duodecimo may often prove
too heavy (otot vvv ftpoTou) for the descendants
of men to whom the folio was a pastime. But
what does Mr. Masson mean by "continuous " ?
To me it seems rather as if his somewhat ram
bling history of the seventeenth century were
interrupted now and then by an unexpected
apparition of Milton, who, like Paul Pry, just
pops in and hopes he does not intrude, to tell
us what he has been doing in the mean while.
The reader, immersed in Scottish politics or the
schemes of Archbishop Laud, is a little puzzled
at first, but reconciles himself on being reminded
that this fair-haired young man is the protago
nist of the drama. Pars minima est ipsapuella sui.

MILTON 249

If Goethe was right in saying that every man
was a citizen of his age as well as of his country,
there can be no doubt that in order to under
stand the motives and conduct of the man we
must first make ourselves intimate with the time
in which he lived. We have therefore no fault
to find with the thoroughness of Mr. Masson's
" historical inquiries." The more thorough the
better, so far as they were essential to the satis
factory performance of his task. But it is only
such contemporary events, opinions, or persons
as were really operative on the character of the
man we are studying that are of consequence,
and we are to familiarize ourselves with them,
not so much for the sake of explaining as of
understanding him. The biographer, especially
of a literary man, need only mark the main cur
rents of tendency, without being officious to
trace out to its marshy source every runlet that
has cast in its tiny pitcherful with the rest. Much
less should he attempt an analysis of the stream
and to classify every component by itself, as
if each were ever effectual singly and not in
combination. Human motives cannot be thus
chemically cross-examined, nor do we arrive
at any true knowledge of character by such
minute subdivision of its ingredients. Nothing
is so essential to a biographer as an eye that can
distinguish at a glance between real events that
are the levers of thought and action, and what

25o MILTON

Donne calls " unconcerning things, matters of
fact," — between substantial personages, whose
contact or even neighborhood is influential, and
the supernumeraries that serve first to fill up a
stage and afterwards the interstices of a bio
graphical dictionary.

" Time hath a wallet at his back
Wherein he puts alms for Oblivion."

Let the biographer keep his fingers orT that
sacred and merciful deposit, and not renew for
us the bores of a former generation as if we had
not enough of our own. But if he cannot for
bear that unwise inquisitiveness, we may fairly
complain when he insists on taking us along
with him in the processes of his investigation,
instead of giving us the sifted results in their
bearing on the life and character of his subject,
whether for help or hindrance. We are blinded
with the dust of old papers ransacked by Mr.
Masson to find out that they have no relation
whatever to his hero. He had been wise if he
had kept constantly in view what Milton him
self says of those who gathered up personal tra
ditions concerning the Apostles : " With less
fervency was studied what St. Paul or St. John
had written than was listened to one that could
say c Here he taught, here he stood, this was
his stature, and thus he went habited ; and O,
happy this house that harbored him, and that
cold stone whereon he rested, this village where

MILTON 251

he wrought such a miracle/ . . . Thus while
all their thoughts were poured out upon cir
cumstances and the gazing after such men as
had sat at table with the Apostles, ... by this
means they lost their time and truanted on the
fundamental grounds of saving knowledge, as
was seen shortly in their writings." Mr. Mas-
son has so poured out his mind upon circumstances^
that his work reminds us of Allston's picture of
Elijah in the Wilderness, where a good deal of
research at last enables us to guess at the pro
phet absconded like a conundrum in the land
scape where the very ravens could scarce have
found him out, except by divine commission.
The figure of Milton becomes but a speck on
the enormous canvas crowded with the scenery
through which he may by any possibility be
conjectured to have passed. I will cite a single
example of the desperate straits to which Mr.
Masson is reduced in order to hitch Milton on
to his own biography. He devotes the first
chapter of his Second Book to the meeting of
the Long Parliament. "Already," he tells us,
" in the earlier part of the day, the Commons
had gone through the ceremony of hearing the
writ for the Parliament read, and the names of
the members that had been returned called over
by Thomas Wyllys, Esq., the Clerk of the
Crown in Chancery. His deputy, Agar, Mil
ton s brother-in-law^ may have been in attendance

252 MILTON

on such an occasion. During the preceding month
or two, at all events, Agar and his subordinates
in the Crown Office had been unusually busy
with the issue of the writs and with the other
work connected with the opening of Parlia
ment." (Vol. ii. p. 150.) Mr. Masson's resolute
"at all events" is very amusing. Meanwhile

" The hungry sheep look up and are not fed."

Augustine Thierry has a great deal to answer
for, if to him we owe the modern fashion of writ
ing history picturesquely. At least his method
leads to most unhappy results when essayed by
men to whom Nature has denied a sense of what
the picturesque really is. The historical pic
turesque does not consist in truth of costume
and similar accessories, but in the grouping,
attitude, and expression of the figures, caught
when they are unconscious that the artist is
sketching them. The moment they are posed
for a composition, unless by a man of genius,
the life has gone out of them. In the hands of
an inferior artist, who fancies that imagination
is something to be squeezed out of color-tubes,
the past becomes a phantasmagoria of jack
boots, doublets, and flap-hats, the mere pro
perty-room of a deserted theatre, as if the light
had been scenical and illusory, the world an
unreal thing that vanished with the foot-lights.
It is the power of catching the actors in great

MILTON 253

events at unawares that makes the glimpses
given us by contemporaries so vivid and pre
cious. And Saint-Simon, one of the great masters
of the picturesque, lets us into the secret of his
art when he tells us how, in that wonderful scene
of the death of Monseigneur, he saw " du pre
mier coup d'oeil vivement porte, tout ce qui leur
echappoit et tout ce qui les accableroit." It is
the gift of producing this reality that almost
makes us blush, as if we had been caught peep
ing through a keyhole, and had surprised secrets
to which we had no right, — it is this only that
can justify the pictorial method of narration.
Mr. Carlyle has this power of contemporizing
himself with bygone times, he cheats us to

" Play with our fancies and believe we see "; —

but we find the tableaux vivants of the appren
tices who "deal in his command without his
power," and who compel us to work very hard
indeed with our fancies, rather wearisome. The
effort of weaker arms to shoot with his mighty
bow has filled the air of recent literature with
more than enough fruitless twanging.

Mr. Masson's style, at best cumbrous, be
comes intolerably awkward when he strives to
make up for the want of Saint-Simon's premier
coup d'azil by impertinent details of what we
must call the pseudo-dramatic kind. For ex
ample, does Hall profess to have traced Milton

254 MILTON

from the University to a "suburb sink " of Lon
don ? Mr. Masson fancies he hears Milton say
ing to himself, " A suburb sink ! has Hall or
his son taken the trouble to walk all the way
down to Aldersgate here, to peep up the entry
where I live, and so have an exact notion of my
whereabouts ? There has been plague in the
neighborhood certainly; and I hope Jane Yates
had my doorstep tidy for the visit." Does Mil
ton, answering Hall's innuendo that he was
courting the graces of a rich widow, tell us that
he would rather " choose a virgin of mean for
tunes honestly bred " ? Mr. Masson forthwith
breaks forth in a paroxysm of what we suppose
to be picturesqueness in this wise : " What have
we here ? Surely nothing less, if we choose so
to construe it, than a marriage advertisement !
Ho, all ye virgins of England (widows need not
apply), here is an opportunity such as seldom
occurs : a bachelor, unattached ; age, thirty-three
years and three or four months ; height [Milton,
by the way, would have said highth~] middle or
a little less ; personal appearance unusually
handsome, with fair complexion and light au
burn hair ; circumstances independent ; tastes
intellectual and decidedly musical ; principles
Root-and- Branch ! Was there already any
young maiden in whose bosom, had such an
advertisement come in her way, it would have
raised a conscious flutter ? If so, did she live

MILTON 255

near Oxford? " If there is anything worse than
an unimaginative man trying to write imagina
tively, it is a heavy man when he fancies he is
being facetious. He tramples out the last spark
of cheerfulness with the broad damp foot of a
hippopotamus.

I am no advocate of what is called the dignity
of history, when it means, as it too often does,
that dulness has a right of sanctuary in gravity.
Too well do I recall the sorrows of my youth,
when I was shipped in search of knowledge on
the long Johnsonian swell of the last century,
favorable to anything but the calm digestion of
historic truth. I had even then an uneasy sus
picion, which has ripened into certainty, that
thoughts were never draped in long skirts like
babies, if they were strong enough to go alone.
But surely there should be such a thing as good
taste, above all a sense of self-respect, in the
historian himself, that should not allow him to
play any tricks with the dignity of his subject.
A halo of sacredness has hitherto invested the
figure of Milton, and our image of him has
dwelt securely in ideal remoteness from the vul
garities of life. No diaries, no private letters,
remain to give the idle curiosity of after-times
the right to force itself on the hallowed seclusion
of his reserve. That a man whose familiar epis
tles were written in the language of Cicero,
whose sense of personal dignity was so great

z$6 MILTON

that, when called on in self-defence to speak of
himself, he always does it with an epical state-
liness of phrase, and whose self-respect even in
youth was so profound that it resembles the
reverence paid by other men to a far-off and
idealized character, — that he should be treated
in this off-hand familiar fashion by his biogra
pher seems to us a kind of desecration, a viola
tion of good manners no less than of the laws of
biographic art. Milton is the last man in the
world to be slapped on the back with impunity.
Better the surly injustice of Johnson than such
presumptuous friendship as this. Let the seven
teenth century, at least, be kept sacred from the
insupportable foot of the interviewer !

But Mr. Masson, in his desire to be (shall I
say) idiomatic, can do something worse than
what has been hitherto quoted. He can be even
vulgar. Discussing the motives of Milton's first
marriage, he says, " Did he come seeking his
^500, and did Mrs. Powell heave a daughter at
him ? " We have heard of a woman throwing
herself at a man's head, and the image is a
somewhat violent one ; but what is this to Mr.
Masson's improvement on it ? It has been
sometimes affirmed that the fitness of an image
may be tested by trying whether a picture could
be made of it or not. Mr. Masson has certainly
offered a new and striking subject to the histor
ical school of British art. A little further on,

MILTON 257

speaking of Mary Powell, he says, " We have
no portrait of her, nor any account of her ap
pearance ; but on the usual rule of the elective
affinities of opposites, Milton being fair, we will
vote her to have been dark-haired." I need say
nothing of the good taste of this sentence, but
its absurdity is heightened by the fact that Mr.
Masson himself had left us in doubt whether
the match was one of convenience or inclination.
I know not how it may be with other readers,
but for myself I feel inclined to resent this
hail-fellow-well-met manner with its jaunty
" we will vote." In some cases, Mr. Masson's
indecorums in respect of style may possibly be
accounted for as attempts at humor by one who
has an imperfect notion of its ingredients. In
such experiments, to judge by the effect, the
pensive element of the compound enters in too
large an excess over the hilarious. Whether I
have hit upon the true explanation, or whether
the cause lie not rather in a besetting velleity
of the picturesque and vivid, I shall leave the
reader to judge by an example or two. In the
manuscript copy of Milton's sonnet in which he
claims for his own house the immunity which
the memory of Pindar and Euripides secured
for other walls, the title had originally been,
" On his Door when the City expected an Assault"
Milton has drawn a line through this and sub
stituted " When the Assault was intended to the

258 MILTON

City" Mr. Masson fancies <f a mood of jest or
semi-jest in the whole affair " ; but we think
rather that Milton's quiet assumption of equal
ity with two such famous poets was as seriously
characteristic as Dante's ranking himself sesto
tra cotanto senno. Mr. Masson takes advantage
of the obliterated title to imagine one of Prince
Rupert's troopers entering the poet's study and
finding some of his "Anti-Episcopal pamphlets
that had been left lying about inadvertently.
' Oho ! ' the Cavalier Captain might then have
said, < Pindar and Euripides are all very well,
by G — ! I Ve been at college myself; and
when I meet a gentleman and scholar, I hope
I know how to treat him ; but neither Pindar
nor Euripides ever wrote pamphlets against the
Church of England, by G — ! It won't do, Mr.
Milton ! ' This, it may be supposed, is Mr.
Masson's way of being funny and dramatic at
the same time. Good taste is shocked with this
barbarous dissonance. Could not the Muse
defend her son? Again, when Charles I., at
Edinburgh, in the autumn and winter of 1641,
fills the vacant English sees, we are told, "It was
more than an insult ; it was a sarcasm ! It was
as if the King, while giving Alexander Hender
son his hand to kiss, had winked his royal eye
over that reverend Presbyter's back ! " Now
one can conceive Charles II. winking when he
took the Solemn League and Covenant, but

MILTON 259

never his father under any circumstances. He
may have been, and I believe he was, a bad
king, but surely we may take Marvell's word
for it, that

" He nothing common did or mean "

upon any of the " memorable scenes " of his
life. The image is therefore out of all imagina
tive keeping, and vulgarizes the chief personage
in a grand historical tragedy, who, if not a great,
was at least a decorous actor. But Mr. Masson
can do worse than this. Speaking of a Mrs.
{Catherine Chidley, who wrote in defence of the
Independents against Thomas Edwards, he says,
" People wondered who this she-Brownist,
Katherine Chidley, was, and did not quite lose
their interest in her when they found that she
was an oldish woman, and a member of some
hole-and-corner congregation in London. In
deed, she 'put her nails into Mr. Edwards with
some effect'' Why did he not say at once, after
the good old fashion, that she " set her ten com
mandments in his face"? In another place he
speaks of" Satan standing with his staff around
him." Mr. Masson's style, a little Robertsonian
at best, naturally grows worse when forced to con
descend to every-day matters. He can no more
dismount and walk than the man in armor on
a Lord Mayor's day. "It [Aldersgate Street]
stretches away northwards a full fourth of a mile

260 MILTON

as one continuous thoroughfare, until, crossed
by Long Lane and the Barbican, it parts with
the name of Aldersgate Street, and, under the
new names of Goswell Street and Goswell Road,
completes its tendency towards the suburbs and
fields about Islington." What a noble work
might not the Directory be if composed on this
scale ! The imagination even of an alderman
might well be lost in that full quarter of a mile
of continuous thoroughfare. Mr. Masson is
very great in these passages of civic grandeur ;
but he is more surprising, on the whole, where
he has an image to deal with. Speaking of
Milton's " two-handed engine " in " Lycidas,"
he says : " May not Milton, whatever else he
meant, have meant a coming English Parlia
ment with its two Houses ? Whatever he meant,
his prophecy had come true. As he sat among
his books in Aldersgate Street, the two-handed
engine at the door of the English Church was
on the swing. Once, twice, thrice, it had swept
its arcs to gather energy ; now it was on the
backmost poise, and the blow was to descend."
One cannot help wishing that Mr. Masson
would try his hand on the tenth horn of the
beast in Revelation, or on the time and half a
time of Daniel. There is something so consol
ing to a prophet in being told that, no matter
what he meant, his prophecy had come true,
and that he might mean " whatever else " he

MILTON 261

pleased, so long as he may have meant what we
choose to think he did, reasoning backward from
the assumed fulfilment ! But perhaps there may
be detected in Mr. Masson's " swept its arcs "
a little of that prophetic hedging-in vagueness
to which he allows so generous a latitude. How
if the " two-handed engine/' after all, were a
broom (or besom, to be more dignified), —
' ' Sweeping — vehemently sweeping,
No pause admitted, no design avowed," —

like that wielded by the awful shape which Dion
the Syracusan saw ? I make the suggestion mod
estly, though somewhat encouraged by Mr. Mas-
son's system of exegesis, which reminds one of the
casuists' doctrine of probables, in virtue of which
a man may be probabiliter obligatus and probabil-
iter deobligatus at the same time. But perhaps
the most remarkable instance of Mr. Masson's
figures of speech is where we are told that the
king might have established a bona fide govern
ment " by giving public ascendency to the popu
lar or Parliamentary element in his Council, and
inducing the old leaven in it either to accept the
new policy ', or to withdraw and become inactive"
There is something consoling in the thought
that yeast should be accessible to moral suasion.
It is really too bad that bread should ever be
heavy for want of such an appeal to its moral
sense as should " induce it to accept the new
policy." Of Mr. Masson's unhappy infection

262 MILTON

with the vivid style an instance or two shall be
given in justification of what has been alleged
against him in that particular. He says of Lou-
don that " he was committed to the Tower,
where for more than two months he lay, with
as near a prospect as ever prisoner had of a
chop with the executioner's axe on a scaffold on
Tower Hill.'* I may be over-fastidious, but the
word " chop " offends my ears with its coarse
ness, or if that be too strong, has certainly the
unpleasant effect of an emphasis unduly placed.
Old Auchinleck's saying of Cromwell, that " he
gart kings ken they had a lith in their necks,"
is a good example of really vivid phrase, sug
gesting the axe and the block, and giving one
of those dreadful hints to the imagination which
are more powerful than any amount of detail,
and whose skilful use is the only magic em
ployed by the masters of truly picturesque writ
ing. The sentence just quoted will serve also as
an example of that tendency to surplusage which
adds to the bulk of Mr. Masson's sentences at
the cost of their effectiveness. If he had said
simply " chop on Tower Hill " (if chop there
must be), it had been quite enough, for we all
know that the executioner's axe and the scaffold
are implied in it. Once more, and I have done
with the least agreeable part of my business.
Mr, Masson, after telling over again the story
of Strafford with needless length of detail, ends

MILTON 263

thus : " On Wednesday, the I2th of May, that
proud curly head, the casket of that brain of
power, rolled on the scaffold of Tower Hill."
Why curly ? Surely it is here a ludicrous im
pertinence. This careful thrusting forward of
outward and unmeaning particulars, in the hope
of giving that reality to a picture which genius
only has the art to do, is becoming a weariness
in modern descriptive writing. It reminds one
of the Mrs. Jarley expedient of dressing the
waxen effigies of murderers in the very clothes
they wore when they did the deed, or with the
real halter round their necks wherewith they
expiated it. It is probably very effective with
the torpid sensibilities of the class who look upon
wax figures as works of art. True imaginative
power works with other material. Lady Mac
beth striving to wash away from her hands the
damned spot that is all the more there to the
mind of the spectator because it is not there at
all, is a type of the methods it employs and the
intensity of their action.

Having discharged my duty in regard to Mr.
Masson's faults of manner, which I should not
have dwelt on so long had they not greatly
marred a real enjoyment in the reading, and
were they not the ear-mark of a school which
has become unhappily numerous, I turn to a
consideration of his work as a whole. I think
he made a mistake in his very plan, or else was

264 MILTON

guilty of a misnomer in his title. His book is
not so much a life of Milton as a collection of
materials out of which a careful reader may sift
the main facts of the poet's biography. His pas
sion for minute detail is only to be equalled by
his difFuseness on points mainly if not altogether
irrelevant. He gives us a Survey of British Lit
erature, occupying one hundred and twenty-
eight pages of his first volume, written in the
main with good judgment, and giving the aver
age critical opinion upon nearly every writer,
great and small, who was in any sense a con
temporary of Milton. I have no doubt all this
would be serviceable and interesting to Mr.
Masson's classes in Edinburgh University, and
they may well be congratulated on having so
competent a teacher ; but what it has to do with
Milton, unless in the case of such authors as
may be shown to have influenced his style or
turn of thought, one does not clearly see. Most
readers of a life of Milton may be presumed to
have some knowledge of the general literary his
tory of the time, or at any rate to have the means
of acquiring it, and Milton's manner (his style
was his own) was very little affected by any of
the English poets, with the single exception, in
his earlier poems, of George Wither. Mr. Mas-
son also has something to say about everybody,
from Wentworth to the obscurest Brownist
fanatic who was so much as heard of in England

MILTON 265

during Milton's lifetime. If this theory of a
biographer's duty should hold, our grandchil
dren may expect to see " A Life of Thackeray,
or who was who in England, France, and Ger
many during the first Half of the Nineteenth
Century." These digressions of Mr. Masson's
from what should have been his main topic (he
always seems somehow to be " completing his
tendency towards the suburbs " of his subject)
give him an uneasy feeling that he must get
Milton in somehow or other at intervals, if it
were only to remind the reader that he has a
certain connection with the book. He is eager
even to discuss a mere hypothesis, though an
untenable one, if it will only increase the num
ber of pages devoted specially to Milton, and
thus lessen the apparent disproportion between
the historical and the biographical matter. Mil
ton tells us that his morning wont had been "to
read good authors, or cause them to be read, till
the attention be weary, or memory have his full
fraught ; then with useful and generous labors
preserving the body's health and hardiness, to
render lightsome, clear, and not lumpish obedi
ence to the mind, to the cause of religion and
our country's liberty when it shall require firm
hearts in sound bodies to stand and cover their
stations rather than see the ruin of our Protest
antism and the enforcement of a slavish life."
Mr. Masson snatches at the hint : " This is in-

266 MILTON

teresting," he says ; " Milton, it seems, has for
some time been practising drill ! The City Artil
lery Ground was near. . . . Did Milton among
others make a habit of going there of mornings ?
Of this more hereafter." When Mr. Masson
returns to the subject he speaks of Milton's "all
but positive statement . . . that in the spring of
1642, or a few months before the breaking out
of the Civil War, he was in the habit of spend
ing a part of each day in military exercise some
where not far from his house in Alder sgate Street"
What he puts by way of query on page 402
has become downright certainty seventy-nine
pages further on. The passage from Milton's
tract makes no " statement " of the kind it
pleases Mr. Masson to assume. It is merely a
Miltonian way of saying that he took regular
exercise, because he believed that moral no less
than physical courage demanded a sound body.
And what proof does Mr. Masson bring to con
firm his theory ? Nothing more nor less than
two or three passages in " Paradise Lost," of
which I shall quote only so much as is essen
tial to his argument : —

" And now

Advanced in view they stand, a horrid front
Of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise
Of warriors old with ordered spear and shield,
Awaiting what command their mighty chief
Had to impose." l

1 Bk. i. 562-567.

MILTON 267

Mr. Masson assures us that " there are touches
in this description (as, for example, the ordering
of arms at the moment of halt, and without word
of command) too exact and technical to have
occurred to a mere civilian. Again, at the same
review

" ' He now prepared

To speak; whereat their doubled ranks they bend
From wing to wing, and half enclose him round
With all his peers; attention held them mute.' l

To the present day this is the very process, or
one of the processes, when a commander wishes
to address his men. They wheel inward and
stand at c attention/ ' But his main argument
is the phrase "ported spears," in Book Fourth,
on which he has an interesting and valuable
comment. He argues the matter through a
dozen pages or more, seeking to prove that
Milton must have had some practical experience
of military drill. I confess a very grave doubt
whether "attention" and "ordered" in the pass
ages cited have any other than their ordinary
meaning, and Milton could never have looked
on at the pike-exercise without learning what
" ported " meant. But, be this as it may, I will
venture to assert that there was not a boy in
New England, forty years ago, who did not
know more of the manual than is implied in
Milton's use of these terms. Mr. Masson's
1 Bk. i. 615-618.

268 MILTON

object in proving Milton to have been a pro
ficient in these martial exercises is to increase our
wonder at his not entering the army. " If there
was any man in England of whom one might
surely have expected that he would be in arms
among the Parliamentarians," he says, " that
man was Milton." Milton may have had many
an impulse to turn soldier, as all men must in
such times, but I do not believe that he ever
seriously intended it. Nor is it any matter of
reproach that he did not. It is plain, from his
works, that he believed himself very early set
apart and consecrated for tasks of a very differ
ent kind, for services demanding as much self-
sacrifice and of more enduring result. I have no
manner of doubt that he, like Dante, believed
himself divinely inspired with what he had to
utter, and, if so, why not also divinely guided
in what he should do or leave undone ? Milton
wielded in the cause he loved a weapon far more
effective than a sword.

It is a necessary result of Mr. Masson's
method that a great deal of space is devoted to
what might have befallen his hero and what he
might have seen. This leaves a broad margin
indeed for the insertion of purely hypothetical
incidents. Nay, so desperately addicted is he to
what he deems the vivid style of writing, that
he even goes out of his way to imagine what
might have happened to anybody living at the

MILTON 269

same time with Milton. Having told us fairly
enough how Shakespeare, on his last visit to
London, perhaps saw Milton " a fair child of
six playing at his father's door," he must needs
conjure up an imaginary supper at the Mermaid.
"Ah! what an evening . . . was that ; and how
Ben and Shakespeare be-tongved each other, while
the others listened and wondered ; and how, when
the company dispersed, the sleeping street heard
their departing footsteps, and the stars shone
down on the old roofs." Certainly, if we may
believe the old song, the stars " had nothing
else to do," though their chance of shining in
the middle of a London November may perhaps
be reckoned very doubtful. An author should
consider how largely the art of writing consists
in knowing what to leave in the inkstand.

Mr. Masson's volumes contain a great deal
of very valuable matter, whatever one may think
of its bearing upon the life of Milton. The
chapters devoted to Scottish affairs are partic
ularly interesting to a student of the Great
Rebellion, its causes and concomitants. His
analyses of the two armies, of the Parliament,
and the Westminster Assembly, are sensible
additions to our knowledge. A too painful
thoroughness, indeed, is the criticism we should
make on his work as a biography. Even as a
history, the reader might complain that it con
fuses by the multiplicity of its details, while it

270 MILTON

wearies by want of continuity. Mr. Masson
Jacks the skill of an accomplished story-teller.
A fact is to him a fact, never mind how unes
sential, and he misses the breadth of truth in
his devotion to accuracy. The very order of his
title-page, " The Life of Milton, narrated in
Connection with the Political, Ecclesiastical, and
Literary History of his Time," shows, it should
seem, a misconception of the true nature of his
subject. Milton's chief importance, it might be
fairly said his only importance, is literary. His
place is fixed as the most classical of our poets.
Neither in politics, theology, nor social ethics,
did Milton leave any distinguishable trace on
the thought of his time or in the history of
opinion. In all these lines of his activity cir
cumstances forced upon him the position of a
controversialist whose aims and results are by the
necessity of the case desultory and ephemeral.
Hooker before him and Hobbes after him had
a far firmer grasp of fundamental principles
than he. His studies in these matters were
perfunctory and occasional, and his opinions
were heated to the temper of the times and
shaped to the instant exigencies of the forum,
sometimes to his own convenience at the mo
ment, instead of being the slow result of a
deliberate judgment enlightened by intellectual
and above all historical sympathy with his sub
ject. His interest was rather in the occasion

MILTON 271

than the matter of the controversy. No aphor
isms of political science are to be gleaned from
his writings as from those of Burke. His
intense personality could never so far dissociate
itself from the question at issue as to see it in
its larger scope and more universal relations.
He was essentially a doctrinaire, ready to sacri
fice everything to what at the moment seemed
the abstract truth, and with no regard to his
torical antecedents and consequences, provided
those of scholastic logic were carefully observed.
He has no respect for usage or tradition except
when they count in his favor, and sees no virtue
in that power of the past over the minds and con
duct of men which alone insures the continuity
of national growth and is the great safeguard of
order and progress. The life of a nation was
of less importance to him than that it should
be conformed to certain principles of belief and
conduct. Burke could distil political wisdom
out of history because he had a profound con
sciousness of the soul that underlies and outlives
events, and of the national character that gives
them meaning and coherence. Accordingly his
words are still living and operative, while Mil
ton's pamphlets are strictly occasional and no
longer interesting except as they illustrate him.
In the Latin ones especially there is an odd
mixture of the pedagogue and the public orator.
His training, so far as it was thorough, so far,

272 MILTON

indeed, as it may be called optional, was purely
poetical and artistic. A true Attic bee, he made
boot on every lip where there was a trace of
truly classic honey.

Milton, indeed, could hardly have been a
match for some of his antagonists in theological
and ecclesiastical learning. But he brought into
the contest a white heat of personal conviction
that counted for much. His self-consciousness,
always active, identified him with the cause he
undertook. " I conceived myself to be now not
as mine own person, but as a member incorpo
rate into that truth whereof I was persuaded and
whereof I had declared myself openly to be the
partaker." ' Accordingly it does not so much
seem that he is the advocate of Puritanism, Free
dom of Conscience, or the People of England,
as that all these are he^ and that he is speaking
for himself. He was not nice in the choice of
his missiles, and too often borrows a dirty lump
from the dunghill of Luther ; but now and then
the gnarled sticks of controversy turn to golden
arrows of Phoebus in his trembling hands, sing
ing as they fly and carrying their messages of
doom in music. Then, truly, in his prose as in
his verse, his is the large utterance of the early
gods, and there is that in him which tramples all
learning under his victorious feet. From the first
he looked upon himself as a man dedicated and
1 Apology for Smectymnuus.

MILTON 273

set apart. He had that sublime persuasion of a
divine mission which sometimes lifts his speech
from personal to cosmopolitan significance ; his
genius unmistakably asserts itself from time to
time, calling down fire from heaven to kindle the
sacrifice of irksome private duty, and turning
the hearthstone of an obscure man into an altar
for the worship of mankind. Plainly enough
here was a man who had received something
other than Episcopal ordination. Mysterious
and awful powers had laid their unimaginable
hands on that fair head and devoted it to a nobler
service. Yet it must be confessed that, with the
single exception of the " Areopagitica," Milton's
tracts are wearisome reading, and going through
them is like a long sea-voyage whose monotony
is more than compensated for the moment by a
stripe of phosphorescence heaping before you in
a drift of star-sown snow, coiling away behind
in winking disks of silver, as if the conscious ele
ment were giving out all the moonlight it had
garnered in its loyal depths since first it gazed
upon its pallid regent. Which, being interpreted,
means that his prose is of value because it is
Milton's, because it sometimes exhibits in an
inferior degree the qualities of his verse, and
not for its power of thought, of reasoning, or
of statement. It is valuable, where it is best,
for its inspiring quality, like the fervencies of a
Hebrew prophet. The English translation of

274 MILTON

the Bible had to a very great degree Judaized,
not the English mind, but the Puritan temper.
Those fierce enthusiasts could more easily find
elbow-room for their consciences in an ideal
Israel than in a practical England. It was con
venient to see Amalek or Philistia in the men
who met them in the field, and one unintelli
gible horn or other of the Beast in their theo
logical opponents. The spiritual provincialism
of the Jewish race found something congenial
in the English mind. Their national egotism
quintessentialized in the prophets was especially
sympathetic with the personal egotism of Mil
ton. It was only as an inspired and irrespon
sible person that he could live on decent terms
with his own self-confident individuality. There
is an intolerant egotism which identifies itself
with omnipotence,1 and whose sublimity is its
apology ; there is an intolerable egotism which
subordinates the sun to the watch in its own fob.
Milton's was of the former kind, and accordingly
the finest passages in his prose and not the least
fine in his verse are autobiographic, and this is
the more striking that they are often uncon
sciously so. Those fallen angels in utter ruin
and combustion hurled, are also cavaliers fight
ing against the Good Old Cause ; Philistia is

1 " For him I was not sent, nor yet to free

That people, victor once, now vile and base,
Deservedly made vassal." (P. R.,iv. 131-133.)

MILTON 275

the Restoration, and what Samson did, that Mil
ton would have done if he could.

The " Areopagitica " might seem an excep
tion, but that also is a plea rather than an argu
ment, and his interest in the question is not
one of abstract principle, but of personal relation
to himself. He was far more rhetorician than
thinker. The sonorous amplitude of his style
was better fitted to persuade the feelings than to
convince the reason. The only passages from
his prose that may be said to have survived are
emotional, not argumentative, or they have lived
in virtue of their figurative beauty, not their
weight of thought. Milton's power lay in dila
tion. Touched by him, the simplest image, the
most obvious thought,

" Dilated stood
Like Teneriffe or Atlas . . .
. . . nor wanted in his grasp
What seemed both spear and shield."

But the thin stiletto of Macchiavelli is a more
effective weapon than these fantastic arms of his.
He had not the secret of compression that pro
perly belongs to the political thinker, on whom,
as Hazlitt said of himself, " nothing but abstract
ideas makes any impression." Almost every
aphoristic phrase that he has made current is
borrowed from some one of the classics, like his
famous

" License they mean when they cry liberty,"

276 MILTON

from Tacitus. This is no reproach to him so far
as his true function, that of poet, is concerned.
It is his peculiar glory that literature was with
him so much an art, an end and not a means.
Of his political work he has himself told us, " I
should not choose this manner of writing,
wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself (led
by the genial power of nature to another task),
I have the use, as I may account, but of my
left hand."

Mr. Masson has given an excellent analysis
of these writings, selecting with great judgment
the salient passages, which have an air of blank
verse thinly disguised as prose, like some of the
corrupted passages of Shakespeare. We are par
ticularly thankful to him for his extracts from
the pamphlets written against Milton, especially
for such as contain criticisms on his style. It is
not a little interesting to see the most stately of
poets reproached for his use of vulgarisms and
low words. We seem to get a glimpse of the
schooling of his cc choiceful sense " to that nicety
which could not be content till it had made his
native tongue " search all her coffers round.'*
One cannot help thinking also that his practice
in prose, especially in the long involutions of
Latin periods, helped him to give that variety
of pause and that majestic harmony to his blank
verse which have made it so unapproachably his
own. Landor, who, like Milton, seems to have

MILTON 277

thought in Latin, has caught somewhat more
than others of the dignity of his gait, but with
out his length of stride. Wordsworth, at his
finest, has perhaps approached it, but with how
long an interval ! Bryant has not seldom at
tained to its serene equanimity, but never emu
lates its pomp. Keats has caught something
of its large utterance, but altogether fails of its
nervous severity of phrase. Cowper's muse
(that moved with such graceful ease in slippers)
becomes stiff when (in his translation of Homer)
she buckles on her feet the cothurnus of Mil
ton. Thomson grows tumid wherever he assays
the grandiosity of his model. It is instructive
to get any glimpse of the slow processes by
which Milton arrived at that classicism which
sets him apart from, if not above, all our other
poets.

In gathering up the impressions made upon
us by Mr. Masson's work as a whole, we are
inclined rather to regret his copiousness for his
own sake than for ours. The several parts,
though disproportionate, are valuable, his re
search has been conscientious, and he has given
us better means of understanding Milton's time
than we possessed before. But how is it about
Milton himself? Here was a chance, it seems
to me, for a fine bit of portrait-painting. There
is hardly a more stately figure in literary history
than Milton's, no life in some of its aspects

278 MILTON

more tragical, except Dante's. In both these
great poets, more than in any others, the char
acter of the men makes part of the singular im-
pressiveness of what they wrote and of its vitality
with after-times. In them the man somehow
overtops the author. The works of both are full
of autobiographical confidences. Like Dante,
Milton was forced to become a party by him
self. He stands out in marked and solitary
individuality, apart from the great movement
of the Civil War, apart from the supine acquies
cence of the Restoration, a self-opinionated,
unforgiving, and unforgetting man. Very much
alive he certainly was in his day. Has Mr.
Masson made him alive to us again ? I fear not.
At the same time, while we cannot praise either
the style or the method of Mr. Masson's work,
we cannot refuse to be grateful for it. It is not
so much a book for the ordinary reader of bio
graphy as for the student, and will be more likely
to find its place on the library-shelf than on the
centre-table. It does not in any sense belong
to light literature, but demands all the muscle
of the trained and vigorous reader. " Truly, in
respect of itself, it is a good life ; but in respect
that it is Milton's life, it is naught."

Mr. Masson's intimacy with the facts and dates
of Milton's career renders him peculiarly fit in
some respects to undertake an edition of the
poetical works. His edition, accordingly, has

MILTON 279

distinguished merits. The introductions to the
several poems are excellent and leave scarcely
anything to be desired. The general Introduc
tion, on the other hand, contains a great deal
that might well have been omitted, and not a
little that is positively erroneous. Mr. Masson's
discussions of Milton's English seem often to
be those of a Scotsman to whom English is
in some sort a foreign tongue. It is almost
wholly inconclusive, because confined to the
Miltonic verse, while the basis of any altogether
satisfactory study should surely be the Miltonic
prose ; nay, should include all the poetry and
prose of his own age and of that immediately
preceding it. The uses to which Mr. Masson
has put the concordance to Milton's poems
tempt one sometimes to class him with those
whom the poet himself taxed with being cc the
mousehunts and ferrets of an index." For ex
ample, what profits a discussion of Milton's
oiTrat; \ey6fjLeva, a matter in which accident is
far more influential than choice ? x What sensi
ble addition is made to our stock of knowledge
by learning that " the word woman does not
occur in any form in Milton's poetry before
c Paradise Lost,'" and that it is "exactly so with
the word female"? Is it any way remarkable that

1 If things are to be scanned so micrologically, what weighty
inferences might not be drawn from Mr. Masson's invariably
printing a7ra£ Xcyo/xeva /

280 MILTON

such words as Adam, God, Heaven, Hell, Para
dise, Sin, Satan, and Serpent should occur " very
frequently " in " Paradise Lost " ? Would it not
rather have been surprising that they should
not ? Such trifles at best come under the head
of what old Warner would have called cumber-
minds. It is time to protest against this minute
style of editing and commenting great poets.
Gulliver's microscopic eye saw on the fair skins
of the Brobdignagian maids of honor " a mole
here and there as broad as a trencher," and we
shrink from a cup of the purest Hippocrene
after the critic's solar microscope has betrayed
to us the grammatical, syntactical, and, above
all, hypothetical monsters that sprawl in every
drop of it. When a poet has been so much
edited as Milton, the temptation of whosoever
undertakes a new edition to see what is not to be
seen becomes great in proportion as he finds
how little there is that has not been seen before.
Mr. Masson is quite right in choosing to
modernize the spelling of Milton, for surely the
reading of our classics should be made as little
difficult as possible, and he is right also in mak
ing an exception of such abnormal forms as the
poet may fairly be supposed to have chosen for
melodic reasons. His exhaustive discussion of
the spelling of the original editions seems, how
ever, to be the less called for as he himself
appears to admit that the compositor, not the

MILTON 281

author, was supreme in these matters, and that
in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases to the
thousand Milton had no system, but spelt by
immediate inspiration. Yet Mr. Masson fills
nearly four pages with an analysis of the vowel
sounds, in which, as if to demonstrate the futility
of such attempts so long as men's ears differ, he
tells us that the short a sound is the same in man
and Darby, the short o sound in God and does,
and what he calls the long o sound in broad and
wrath. Speaking of the apostrophe, Mr. Mas-
son tells us that " it is sometimes inserted, not
as a possessive mark at all, but merely as a plural
mark: hero's for heroes, myrtle's for myrtles, Gor
gon's and Hydra s, etc." Now, in books printed
about the time of Milton's the apostrophe was
put in almost at random, and in all the cases
cited is a misprint, except in the first, where it
serves to indicate that the pronunciation was not
heroes as it had formerly been.1 In the "pos
sessive singular of nouns already ending in j,"
Mr. Masson tells us, " Milton's general practice
is not to double the s ; thus, Nereus wrinkled
look, Glaucus spell. The necessities of metre

1 " That you may tell heroes, when you come
To banquet with your wife. ' '

Chapman's Odyssey, vm. 336, 337.

In the facsimile of the sonnet to Fairfax I find
" Thy firm unshak'n vertue ever brings," —

which shows how much faith we need give to the apostrophe.

282 MILTON

would naturally constrain to such forms. In a
possessive followed by the word sake or the word
side, dislike to [of] the double sibilant makes
us sometimes drop the inflection. In addition
to 'for righteousness' sake,' such phrases as ' for
thy name sake ' and 'for mercy sake,' are allowed
to pass ; bedside is normal and riverside nearly
so." The necessities of metre need not be taken
into account with a poet like Milton, who never
was fairly in his element till he got off the sound
ings of prose and felt the long swell of his verse
under him like a steed that knows his rider. But
does the dislike of the double sibilant account for
the dropping of the s in these cases ? Is it not far
rather the presence of the s already in the sound
satisfying an ear accustomed to the English
slovenliness in the pronunciation of double con
sonants ? It was this which led to such forms
as conscience sake and on justice side, and which
beguiled Ben Jonson and Dryden into thinking,
the one that noise and the other that corps was a
plural.1 What does Mr. Masson say to hillside,
Bankside, seaside, Cheapside, spindleside, spearside,

1 Mr. Masson might have cited a good example of this from
Drummond, whom (as a Scotsman) he is fond of quoting for
an authority in English, —

" Sleep, Silence' child, sweet father of soft rest."

The survival of horse for horses is another example. So by
a reverse process pult and shay have been vulgarly deduced
from the supposed plurals pulse and chaise.

MILTON 283

gospelside (of a church), night side, countryside,
wayside, brookside, and I know not how many
more? Is the first half of these words a possess
ive ? Or is it not rather a noun impressed into
the service as an adjective ? How do such words
differ from hilltop, townend, candlelight, rushlight,
cityman, and the like, where no double s can be
made the scapegoat? Certainly Milton would
not have avoided them for their sibilancy, he
who wrote

"And airy tongues that syllable men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses,"

"So in his seed all nations shall be blest,"
"And seat of Salmanasser whose success," —

verses that hiss like Medusa's head in wrath,
and who was, I think, fonder of the sound than
any other of our poets. Indeed, in compounds
of the kind we always make a distinction wholly
independent of the doubled s. Nobody would
boggle at mountainside ; no one would dream of
saying on the fat her side or mother side.

Mr. Masson speaks of "the Miltonic forms
vanquisht, markt, lookt, etc." Surely he does not
mean to imply that these are peculiar to Milton ?
Chapman used them before Milton was born,
and pressed them farther, as in nak't and saf't
for naked and saved. He often prefers the con
tracted form in his prose also, showing that the
full form of the past participle in ed was passing

284 MILTON

out of fashion, though available in verse.1 In
deed, I venture to affirm that there is not a
single variety of spelling or accent to be found
in Milton which is without example in his pre
decessors or contemporaries. Even highth, which
is thought peculiarly Miltonic, is common (in
Hakluyt, for example), and still often heard in
New England. Mr. Masson gives an odd reason
for Milton's preference of it "as indicating more
correctly the formation of the word by the addi
tion of the suffix th to the adjective high." Is
an adjective, then, at the base of growth, earth,
birth, truth, and other words of this kind ?
Home Tooke made a better guess than this.
If Mr. Masson be right in supposing that a
peculiar meaning is implied in the spelling bearth
(" Paradise Lost," xi. 624), which he interprets
as " collective produce," though in the only

1 Chapman's spelling is presumably his own. At least he
looked after his printed texts. I have two copies of his Byron's
Conspiracy, both dated 1608, but one evidently printed later
than the other, for it shows corrections. The more solemn
ending in ed was probably kept alive by the reading of the
Bible in churches. Though now dropped by the clergy, it is
essential to the right hearing of the more metrical passages in
the Old Testament, which are finer and more scientific than
anything in the language, unless it be some parts of Samson
Agonistes. I remember an old gentleman who always used
the contracted form of the participle in conversation, but always
gave it back its embezzled syllable in reading. Sir Thomas
Browne seems to have preferred the more solemn form. At
any rate he has the spelling empuzzeled in prose.

MILTON 285

other instance where it occurs it is neither more
nor less than birfhy it should seem that Milton
had hit upon Home Tooke's etymology. But
it is really solemn trifling to lay any stress on
the spelling of the original editions, after having
admitted, as Mr. Masson has honestly done,
that in all likelihood Milton had nothing to do
with it. And yet he cannot refrain. On the word
voufsafe he hangs nearly a page of dissertation
on the nicety of Milton's ear. Mr. Masson
thinks that Milton " must have had a reason
for it," x and finds that reason in " his dislike to
[of] the sound ch, or to [of] that sound com
bined with s. . . . His fine ear taught him not
only to seek for musical effects and cadences at
large, but also to be fastidious as to syllables,
and to avoid harsh or difficult conjunctions of
consonants, except when there might be a mu
sical reason for harshness or difficulty. In the
management of the letter s, the frequency of
which in English is one of the faults of the
speech, he will be found, I believe, most careful
and skilful. More rarely, I think, than in

1 He thinks the same of the variation strook and struck,
though they were probably pronounced alike. In Marlowe's
Faust us two consecutive sentences (in prose) begin with the
words " Cursed be he that struck." In a note on the passage
Mr. Dyce tells us that the old editions (there were three)
have stroke and strooke in the first instance, and all agree on
strucke in the second. No inference can be drawn from such
casualties.

286 MILTON

Shakespeare will one word ending in s be found
followed immediately in Milton by another word
beginning with the same letter ; or if he does
occasionally pen such a phrase as Moab's sons,
it will be difficult to find in him, I believe, such
a harsher example as earth* s substance^ of which
many writers would think nothing. [With the
index to back him Mr. Masson could safely say
this.] The same delicacy of ear is even more
apparent in his management of the sh sound.
He has it often, of course ; but it may be noted
that he rejects it in his verse when he can. He
writes Basan for Bashan, Sittim for Shittim, Silo
for Shiloh, Asdod for Ashdod. Still more, how
ever, does he seem to have been wary of the
compound sound ch as in church. Of his sensi
tiveness to this sound in excess there is a curious
proof in his prose pamphlet entitled c An Apo
logy against a Pamphlet, called A Modest
Completion, etc./ where, having occasion to
quote these lines from one of the Satires ' of his
opponent, Bishop Hall, —

" ' Teach each hollow grove to sound his love,
Wearying echo with one changeless word/ —

he adds, ironically, c And so he well might,

1 The lines are not <f from one of the Satires," and Milton
made them worse by misquoting and bringing love jinglingly
near to grove. Hall's verse (in his Satires) is always vigorous
and often harmonious. He long before Milton spoke of rhyme
almost in the very terms of the Preface to Paradise Lost.

MILTON 287

and all his auditory besides, with his teach
each I ' Generalizations are always risky, but
when extemporized from a single hint they are
maliciously so. Surely it needed no great sensi
tiveness of ear to be set on edge by Hall's echo
of teach each. Did Milton reject the h from
Eashan and the rest because he disliked the
sound of shy or because he had found it already
rejected by the Vulgate and by some of the earlier
translators of the Bible into English? Oddly
enough, Milton uses words beginning with sh
seven hundred and fifty-four times in his poetry,
not to speak of others in which the sound occurs,
as, for instance, those ending in tion. Hall, had
he lived long enough, might have retorted on
Milton his own

" Manila/, resolute/, breast,
As the magnetick hardest iron draws," —

or his

" What moves thy inquisition ?
Know'st thou not that my rising is thy fall,
And my promotion thy destruction ? ' '

With the playful controversial wit of the day
he would have hinted that too much est-est is
as fatal to a blank verse as to a bishop, and that
danger was often incurred by those who too
eagerly shunned it. Nay, he might even have
found an echo almost tallying with his own in

" To begirt the almighty throne
Beseeching or besieging," —

288 MILTON

a pun worthy of Milton's worst prose. Or he
might have twitted him with " a j^uent king
who seeks." As for the sh sound, a poet could
hardly have found it ungracious to his ear who
wrote,

" Gnawing for anguij^ and despite and Mame,"

or again,

" Then bursting forth
Afrej^ with conscious terrors vex me round
That rest or interims/;*?;/ none I find.
Before mine eyes in opposition sits
Grim Death, my son."

And if Milton disliked the ch sound, he gave
his ears unnecessary pain by verses such as
these, —

" Straight courses close; then, rising, Manges oft
His cour^ant wa/M, as one who Mose his ground ' ' ;

still more by such a juxtaposition as " match
less chief." '

1 Mr. Masson goes so far as to conceive it possible that
Milton may have committed the vulgarism of leaving a / out
of step'st, "for ease of sound." Yet the poet could bear
boasf st and — one stares and gasps at it — doa? dst. There
is, by the way, a familiar passage in which the ch sound pre
dominates, not without a touch of sh in a single couplet: —

" Can any mortal mixture of earth's mould
Breathe sucA divine enchanting ravij^ment ? "

So

" Blotches and blains must all his flesh emboss j "

and perhaps

" I see his tents
Pitched about Sechem "

might be added.

MILTON 289

The truth is, that Milton was a harmonist
rather than a melodist. There are, no doubt,
some exquisite melodies (like the " Sabrina
Fair ") among his earlier poems, as could hardly
fail to be the case in an age which produced or
trained the authors of our best English glees,
as ravishing in their instinctive felicity as the
songs of our dramatists, but he also showed
from the first that larger style which was to be
his peculiar distinction. The strain heard in
the " Nativity Ode/' in the " Solemn Music,"
and in " Lycidas," is of a higher mood, as re
gards metrical construction, than anything that
had thrilled the English ear before, giving no
uncertain augury of him who was to show what
sonorous metal lay silent till he touched the
keys in the epical organ-pipes of our various
language, that have never since felt the strain
of such prevailing breath. It was in the larger
movements of metre that Milton was great and
original. I have spoken elsewhere of Spenser's
fondness for dilation as respects thoughts and
images. In Milton it extends to the language
also, and often to the single words of which a
period is composed. He loved phrases of tower
ing port, in which every member dilated stands
like Teneriffe or Atlas. In those poems and
passages that stamp him great, the verses do
not dance interweaving to soft Lydian airs, but
march rather with resounding tread and clang

29o MILTON

of martial music. It is true that he is cunning
in alliterations, so scattering them that they tell
in his orchestra without being obvious, but it
is in the more scientific region of open-voweled
assonances which seem to proffer rhyme and yet
withhold it (rhyme-wraiths one might call them),
that he is an artist and a master. He even some
times introduces rhyme with misleading intervals
between and unobviously in his blank verse : —

" There rest, if any rest can harbour there ;
And, reassembling our afflicted powers,
Consult how we may henceforth most offend
Our enemy, our own loss how repair,
How overcome this dire calamity,
What reinforcement we may gain from hope,
If not, what resolution from despair." l

There is one almost perfect quatrain, —
" Before thy fellows, ambitious to win
From me some plume, that thy success may show
Destruction to the rest. This pause between
(Unanswered lest thou boast) to let thee know "; —

and another hardly less so, of a rhyme and an

assonance, —

"If once they hear that voice, their liveliest pledge
Of hope in fears and dangers, heard so oft
In worst extremes and on the perilous edge
Of battle when it raged, in all assaults."

1 I think Coleridge* s nice ear would have blamed the near
ness of enemy and calamity in this passage. Mr. Masson
leaves out the comma after If not, the pause of which is need
ful, I think, to the sense, and certainly to keep not a little
farther apart from what, (" teach each " !)

MILTON 291

There can be little doubt that the rhymes in
the first passage cited were intentional, and per
haps they were so in the others; but Milton's
ear has tolerated not a few perfectly rhyming
couplets, and others in which the assonance
almost becomes rhyme, certainly a fault in blank
verse : —

" From the Asian Kings (and Parthian among these),
From India and the Golden Chersonese ' ' ;

«' That soon refreshed him wearied, and repaired
What hunger, if aught hunger, had impaired ' ' ;

" And will alike be punished, whether thou
Reign or reign not, though to that gentle brow ' ' ;

" Of pleasure, but all pleasure to destroy,
Save what is in destroying, other joy ' ' ;

" Shall all be Paradise, far happier place
Than this of Eden, and far happier days ";

" This my long sufferance and my day of grace
They who neglect and scorn shall never taste ";

"So far remote with diminution seen,
First in his East the glorious lamp was seen." J

These examples (and others might be adduced)
serve to show that Milton's ear was too busy
about the larger interests of his measures to be
always careful of the lesser. He was a strategist
rather than a drill-sergeant in verse, capable,
beyond any other English poet, of putting great
1 " First in his East," is not soothing to the ear.

292 MILTON

masses through the most complicated evolutions
without clash or confusion, but he was not curi
ous that every foot should be at the same angle.
In reading " Paradise Lost " one has a feeling
of vastness. You float under an illimitable sky,
brimmed with sunshine or hung with constella
tions ; the abysses of space are about you ; you
hear the cadenced surges of an unseen ocean ;
thunders mutter round the horizon ; and if the
scene change, it is with an elemental movement
like the shifting of mighty winds. His imagina
tion seldom condenses, like Shakespeare's, in
the kindling flash of a single epithet, but loves
better to diffuse itself. Witness his descriptions,
wherein he seems to circle like an eagle bathing
in the blue streams of air, controlling with his
eye broad sweeps of champaign or of sea, and
rarely fulmining in the sudden swoop of intenser
expression. He was fonder of the vague, perhaps
I should rather say the indefinite, where more
is meant than meets the ear, than any other of
our poets. He loved epithets (like oldzn&far)
that suggest great reaches, whether of space or
time. This bias shows itself already in his
earlier poems, as where he hears
" The/^r <?^~ curfew sound
Over some widewatered shore,'*

or where he fancies the shores ' and sounding

1 There seems to be something wrong in this word shores.
Did Milton write shoals ?

MILTON 293

seas washing Lycidas far away ; but it reaches
its climax in the " Paradise Lost/' He pro
duces his effects by dilating our imaginations
with an impalpable hint rather than by concen
trating them upon too precise particulars. Thus
in a famous comparison of his, the fleet has no
definite port, but plies stemming nightly toward
the pole in a wide ocean of conjecture. He gen
eralizes always instead of specifying, — the true
secret of the ideal treatment in which he is with
out peer, and, though everywhere grandiose, he
is never turgid. Tasso begins finely with

" Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba;
Treman le spaziose atre caverne,
E T aer cieco a quel rumor rimbomba,"

but soon spoils all by condescending to definite
comparisons with thunder and intestinal convul
sions of the earth ; in other words, he is unwary
enough to give us a standard of measurement,
and the moment you furnish Imagination with
a yardstick she abdicates in favor of her statis
tical poor-relation Commonplace. Milton, with
this passage in his memory, is too wise to ham
per himself with any statement for which he
can be brought to book, but wraps himself in a
mist of looming indefiniteness ; —

" He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of hell resounded;"

thus amplifying more nobly by abstention from

294 MILTON

his usual method of prolonged evolution. No
caverns, however spacious, will serve his turn,
because they have limits. He could practise this
self-denial when his artistic sense found it need
ful, whether for variety of verse or for the greater
intensity of effect to be gained by abruptness.
His more elaborate passages have the multitu
dinous roll of thunder, dying away to gather a
sullen force again from its own reverberations,
but he knew that the attention is recalled and
arrested by those claps that stop short without
echo and leave us listening. There are no such
vistas and avenues of verse as his. In reading
the " Paradise Lost " one has a feeling of spa
ciousness such as no other poet gives. Milton's
respect for himself and for his own mind and
its movements rises well-nigh to veneration. He
prepares the way for his thought and spreads on
the ground before the sacred feet of his verse
tapestries inwoven with figures of mythology
and romance. There is no such unfailing dignity
as his. Observe at what a reverent distance he
begins when he is about to speak of himself, as
at the beginning of the Third Book and the
Seventh. His sustained strength is especially
felt in his beginnings. He seems always to start
full-sail ; the wind and tide always serve; there
is never any fluttering of the canvas. In this he
offers a striking contrast with Wordsworth, who
has to go through with a great deal of yo-heave-

MILTON 295

ohing before he gets under way. And though,
in the didactic parts of " Paradise Lost," the
wind dies away sometimes, there is a long swell
that will not let us forget it, and ever and anon
some eminent verse lifts its long ridge above its
tamer peers heaped with stormy memories. And
the poem never becomes incoherent ; we feel all
through it, as in the symphonies of Beethoven,
a great controlling reason in whose safe-conduct
we trust implicitly.

Mr. Masson's discussions of Milton's Eng
lish are, it seems to me, for the most part un
satisfactory. He occupies some ten pages, for
example, with a history of the genitival form //j,
which adds nothing to our previous knowledge
on the subject and which has no relation to
Milton except for its bearing on the author
ship of some verses attributed to him against
the most overwhelming internal evidence to the
contrary. Mr. Masson is altogether too reso
lute to find traces of what he calls oddly enough
" recollectiveness of Latin constructions " in
Milton, and scents them sometimes in what
would seem to the uninstructed reader very
idiomatic English. More than once, at least,
he has fancied them by misunderstanding the
passage in which they seem to occur. Thus,
in "Paradise Lost," xi. 520, 521, —

" Therefore so abject is their punishment,

Disfiguring not God's likeness but their own," —

296 MILTON

has no analogy with eorum deformantium^ for the
context shows that it is the -punishment which
disfigures. Indeed, Mr. Masson so often finds
constructions difficult, ellipses strange, and words
needing annotation that are common to all
poetry, nay, sometimes to all English, that his
notes seem not seldom to have been written by
a foreigner. On this passage in " Comus," —

" I do not think my sister so to seek
Or so unprincipled in virtue's book
And the sweet peace that virtue bosoms ever
As that the single want of light and noise
(Not being in danger, as I trust she is not)
Could stir the constant mood of her calm thoughts,"

Mr. Masson tells us, that " in very strict con
struction, not being would cling to want as its
substantive ; but the phrase passes for the Latin
ablative absolute." So on the words forestalling

J o

night) " i. e. anticipating. Forestall is literally to
anticipate the market by purchasing goods be
fore they are brought to the stall." In the verse
" Thou hast immanacled while Heaven sees good,"

he explains that " while here has the sense of so
long as" But Mr. Masson's notes on the lan
guage are his weakest. He is careful to tell us,
for example, " that there are instances of the use
of shine as a substantive in Spenser, Ben Jonson,
and other poets." It is but another way of spell
ing sheen, and if Mr. Masson never heard a
shoeblack in the street say, " Shall I give you

MILTON 297

a shine, sir?" his experience has been singular.1
His notes in general are very good (though too
long). Those on the astronomy of Milton are
particularly valuable. I think he is sometimes
a little too scornful of parallel passages,2 for if
there is one thing more striking than another
in this poet, it is that his great and original im
agination was almost wholly nourished by books,
perhaps I should rather say set in motion by

1 But his etymological notes are worse. For example, " re-
creanty renouncing the faith, from the old French recroire,
which again is from the mediaeval Latin recredere, to ' believe
back,' or apostatize." This is pure fancy. The word had no
such meaning in either language. He derives serenate from sera,
and says that parle means treaty, negotiation, though it is the
same word as parley, had the same meanings, and was com
monly pronounced like it, as in Marlowe's

" What, shall we parle with this Christian ? "

It certainly never meant treaty, though it may have meant
negotiation. When it did, it implied the meeting face to face
of the principals. On the verses

" And some flowers and some bays
For thy hearse to strew the ways,"

he has a note to tell us that hearse is not to be taken " in our
sense of a carriage for the dead, but in the older sense of a
tomb or framework over a tomb," though the obvious mean
ing is " to strew the ways for thy hearse." How could one
do that for a tomb or the framework over it ?

2 A passage from Dante {Inferno, xi. 96-105), with its
reference to Aristotle, would have given him the meaning of
" Nature taught art," which seems to puzzle him. A study
of Dante and of his earlier commentators would also have been
of great service in the astronomical notes.

298 MILTON

them. It is wonderful how, from the most
withered and juiceless hint gathered in his read
ing, his grand images rise like an exhalation ;
how from the most battered old lamp caught in
that huge drag-net with which he swept the
waters of learning, he could conjure a tall genius
to build his palaces. Whatever he touches swells
and towers. That wonderful passage in " Co-
mus " of the airy tongues, perhaps the most
imaginative in suggestion he ever wrote, was
conjured out of a dry sentence in Purchas's ab
stract of Marco Polo. Such examples help us
to understand the poet. When I find that Sir
Thomas Browne had said before Milton, that
Adam " was the wisest of all men since," I am
glad to find this link between the most profound
and the most stately imagination of that age.
Such parallels sometimes give a hint also of
the historical development of our poetry, of
its apostolical succession, so to speak. Every
one has noticed Milton's fondness of sonorous
proper names, which have not only an acquired
imaginative value by association, and so serve
to awaken our poetic sensibilities, but have
likewise a merely musical significance. This he
probably caught from Marlowe, traces of whom
are frequent in him. There is certainly some
thing of what afterwards came to be called Mil-
tonic in more than one passage of " Tambur-
laine," a play in which gigantic force seems

MILTON 299

struggling from the block, as in Michael Angelo's
Dawn.

Mr. Masson's remarks on the versification
of Milton are, in the main, judicious, but when
he ventures on particulars, one cannot always
agree with him. He seems to understand that
our prosody is accentual merely, and yet, when
he comes to what he calls variations, he talks of
the "substitution of the Trochee, the Pyrrhic, or
the Spondee, for the regular Iambus, or of the
Anapaest, the Dactyl, the Tribrach, etc., for the
same." This is always misleading. The shift
of the accent in what Mr. Masson calls " dis
syllabic variations " is common to all pentameter
verse, and, in the other case, most of the words
cited as trisyllables either were not so in Milton's
day,1 or were so or not at choice of the poet, ac
cording to their place in the verse. There is not
an elision of Milton's without precedent in the
dramatists from whom he learned to write blank
verse. Milton was a greater metrist than any of
them, except Marlowe and Shakespeare, and he
employed the elision (or the slur) oftener than
they to give a faint undulation or retardation to
his verse, only because his epic form demanded

1 Almost every combination of two vowels might in those
days be a diphthong or not, at will. Milton's practice of elision
was confirmed and sometimes (perhaps) modified by his study
of the Italians, with whose usage in this respect he closely
conforms.

3oo MILTON

it more for variety's sake. How Milton would
have read them, is another question. He cer
tainly often marked them by an apostrophe
in his manuscripts. He doubtless composed
according to quantity, so far as that is possible
in English, and as Cowper somewhat extrava
gantly says, " gives almost as many proofs of it
in his c Paradise Lost ' as there are lines in the
poem." ' But when Mr. Masson tells us that

"Self- fed and self-consumed: if this fail,"
and

" Dwells in all Heaven charity so rare,"

are " only nine syllables/' and that in

" Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream,"

" either the third foot must be read as an ana-
p<est or the word hugest must be pronounced
as one syllable, hug st" I think Milton would
have invoked the soul of Sir John Cheek. Of
course Milton read it

" Created hugest that swim th' ocean-stream," —

just as he wrote (if we may trust Mr. Mas-
son's facsimile)

"Thus sang the uncouth swain to th' oaks and rills," —

a verse in which both hiatus and elision occur
precisely as in the Italian poets.2 " Gest that

1 Letter to Rev. W. Bagot, 4th January, 1791.

3 So Dante: —

" Ma sapienza e amore e virtute."

So Donne: —

" Simony and sodomy in churchmen's lives."

MILTON 301

swim " would be rather a knotty anaf^est^ an
insupportable foot indeed ! And why is even
hugst worse than Shakespeare's

" Young st follower of thy drum" ?

In the same way he says of

" For we have also our evening and our morn,"

that " the metre of this line is irregular," and
of the rapidly fine

" Came flying and in mid air aloud thus cried,'

that it is " a line of unusual metre." Why more
unusual than

" As being the contrary to his high will " ?

What would Mr. Masson say to these three
verses from Dekkar ? —

" And knowing so much, I muse thou art so poor ";

"I fan away the dust J?y ing in mine eyes ";

«* Flowing o'er with court news only of you and them."

All such participles (where no consonant di
vided the vowels) were normally of one sylla
ble, permissibly of two.1 If Mr. Masson had
studied the poets who preceded Milton as he

1 Mr. Masson is evidently not very familiar at first hand
with the versification to which Milton's youthful ear had been
trained, but seems to have learned something from Abbott's
Shakespearian Grammar in the interval between writing his
notes and his Introduction. Walker's Shakespeare* s Versifica
tion would have been a great help to him in default of original
knowledge.

302 MILTON

has studied him, he would never have said that
the verse —

" Not this rock only; his omnipresence fills " —

was " peculiar as having a distinct syllable of
over-measure. " He retains Milton's spelling
of hunderd without perceiving the metrical rea
son for it, that d> /, />, ^, etc., followed by / or r,
might be either of two or of three syllables. In
Marlowe we find it both ways in two consecu
tive verses : —

" A hundred [hundered] and fifty thousand horse,
Two hundred thousand foot, brave men at arms." I

Mr. Masson is especially puzzled by verses
ending in one or more unaccented syllables, and
even argues in his Introduction that some of
them might be reckoned Alexandrines. He
cites some lines of Spenser as confirming his
theory, forgetting that rhyme wholly changes
the conditions of the case by throwing the ac
cent (appreciably even now, but more emphatic
ally in Spenser's day) on the last syllable.

" A spirit and judgment equal or superior,"

he calls " a remarkably anomalous line, consist
ing of twelve or even thirteen syllables." Surely
Milton's ear would never have tolerated a dis-

1 Milton has a verse in Comus where the e is elided from
the word sister by its preceding a vowel: —

" Heaven keep my sister ! again, again, and near ! "

This would have been impossible before a consonant.

MILTON 3°3

syllabic " spirit " in such a position. The word
was then more commonly of one syllable, though
it might be two, and was accordingly spelt spreet
(still surviving in sprite), sprit, and even spirt, as
Milton himself spells it in one of Mr. Masson's
facsimiles.1 Shakespeare, in the verse

" Hath put a spirit of youth in everything,"

uses the word admirably well in a position where
it cannot have a metrical value of more than one
syllable, while it gives a dancing movement to
the verse in keeping with the sense. Our old
metrists were careful of elasticity, a quality
which modern verse has lost in proportion as
our language has stiffened into uniformity under
the benumbing fingers of pedants.

This discussion of the value of syllables is not
so trifling as it seems. A great deal of nonsense
has been written about imperfect measures in
Shakespeare, and of the admirable dramatic ef
fect produced by filling up the gaps of missing
syllables with pauses or prolongations of the
voice in reading. In rapid, abrupt, and pas
sionate dialogue this is possible, but in passages
of continuously level speech it is barbarously
absurd. I do not believe that any of our old
dramatists has knowingly left us a single im
perfect verse. Seeing in what a haphazard way

1 So spirito and spirto in Italian, esperis and espirs in Old
French.

304 MILTON

and in how mutilated a form their plays have
mostly reached us, we should attribute such
faults (as a geologist would call them) to any
thing rather than to the deliberate design of the
poets. Marlowe and Shakespeare, the two best
metrists among them, have given us a standard
by which to measure what licenses they took in
versification, — the one in his translations, the
other in his poems. The unmanageable verses
in Milton are very few, and all of them occur in
works printed after his blindness had lessened
the chances of supervision and increased those
of error. There are only two, indeed, which
seem to me wholly indigestible as they stand.
These are,

" Burnt after them to the bottomless pit,"

and

" With them from bliss to the bottomless deep."

This certainly looks like a case where a word
had dropped out or had been stricken out by
some proof-reader who limited the number of
syllables in a pentameter verse by that of his
finger-ends. Mr. Masson notices only the first
of these lines, and says that to make it regular
by accenting the word bottomless on the second
syllable would be " too horrible." Certainly not,
if Milton so accented it, any more than blasphe
mous and twenty more which sound oddly to us
now. However that may be, Milton could not

MILTON 3°5

have intended to close not only a period, but a
paragraph also, with an unmusical verse, and in
the only other passage where the word occurs
it is accented as now on the first syllable : —

" With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell.'*

As bottom is a word which, like bosom and besom^
may be monosyllabic or dissyllabic according
to circumstances, I am persuaded that the last
passage quoted (and all three refer to the same
event) gives us the word wanting in the two
others, and that Milton wrote, or meant to
write,

" Burnt after them down to the bottomless pit,"

which leaves in the verse precisely the kind of
ripple that Milton liked best.1

Much of what Mr. Masson says in his Intro
duction of the way in which the verses of Mil
ton should be read is judicious enough, though
some of the examples he gives, of the "com
icality " which would ensue from compressing
every verse into an exact measure of ten sylla
bles, are based on a surprising ignorance of the

1 Milton, however, would not have balked at th* bottom
less any more than Drayton at th' rejected or Donne at M1
sea. Mr. Masson does not seem to understand this elision, for
he corrects /' thj midst to /' the midst, and takes pains to men
tion it hi a note. He might better have restored the n in f 9
where it is no contraction, but merely indicates the pronunci
ation, as 0' for 0/*and on.
v

3o6 MILTON

laws which guided our poets just before and
during Milton's time in the structure of their
verses. Thus he seems to think that a strict
scansion would require us in the verses

"So he with difficulty and labor hard,''
and

" Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold "

to pronounce diffikty and purp '. Though Mr.
Masson talks of " slurs and elisions/' his ear
would seem somewhat insensible to their exact
nature or office. His diffikty supposes a hiatus
where none is intended, and his making purple
of one syllable wrecks the whole verse, the real
slur in the latter case being on azure or.1 When
he asks whether Milton required " these pro
nunciations in his verse," no positive answer
can be given, but I very much doubt whether
he would have thought that some of the lines
Mr. Masson cites "remain perfectly good Blank
Verse even with the most leisurely natural enun
ciation of the spare syllable," and I am sure he
would have stared if told that " the number of
accents " in a pentameter verse was " variable."
It may be doubted whether elisions and com
pressions which would be thought in bad taste
or even vulgar now were more abhorrent to the
ears of Milton's generation than to a cultivated

1 Exactly analogous to that in treasurer when it is shortened
to two syllables.

MILTON 30?

Italian would be the hearing Dante read as prose.
After all, what Mr. Masson says may be reduced
to the infallible axiom that poetry should be read
as poetry.

Mr. Masson seems to be right in his main
principles, but the examples he quotes make
one doubt whether he knows what a verse is.
For example, he thinks it would be a " horror,"
if in the verse

"That invincible Samson far renowned,"

we should lay the stress on the first syllable of
invincible. It is hard to see why this should
be worse than conventicle or remonstrance or shc-
cessor or incompatible (the three latter used by the
correct Daniel), or why Mr. Masson should
clap an accent on surface merely because it
comes at the end of a verse, and deny it to in
vincible. If one read the verse just cited with
those that go with it, he will find that the accent
must come on the first syllable of invincible, or
else the whole passage becomes chaos.1 Should
we refuse to say obleeged with Pope because the
fashion has changed ? From its apparently
greater freedom in skilful hands, blank verse

1 Milton himself has invisible, for we cannot suppose him
guilty of a verse like

" Shoots invisible virtue even to the deep,"

while, if read rightly, it has just one of those sweeping elisions
that he loved.

3o8 MILTON

gives more scope to sciolistic theorizing and
dogmatism than the rhyming pentameter coup
let, but it is safe to say that no verse is good in
the one that would not be good in the other
when handled by a master like Dryden. Mil
ton, like other great poets, wrote some bad
verses, and it is wiser to confess that they are so
than to conjure up some unimaginable reason
why the reader should accept them as the better
for their badness. Such a bad verse is
" Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens and shapes of death,"

which might be cited to illustrate Pope's

"And ten low words oft creep in one dull line."

Milton cannot certainly be taxed with any
partiality for low words. He rather loved them
tall, as the Prussian King loved men to be six
feet high in their stockings, and fit to go into
the grenadiers. He loved them as much for
their music as for their meaning, — perhaps
more. His style, therefore, when it has to deal
with commoner things, is apt to grow a little
cumbrous and unwieldy. A Persian poet says
that when the owl would boast, he boasts of
catching mice at the edge of a hole. Shake
speare would have understood this. Milton
would have made him talk like an eagle. His
influence is not to be left out of account as par
tially contributing to that decline toward poetic
diction which was already beginning ere he died.

MILTON 309

If it would not be fair to say that he is the most
artistic, he may be called in the highest sense
the most scientific of our poets. If to Spenser
younger poets have gone to be sung to, they
have sat at the feet of Milton to be taught.
Our language has no finer poem than "Samson
Agonistes," if any so fine in the quality of au
stere dignity or in the skill with which the poet's
personal experience is generalized into a classic
tragedy.

Gentle as Milton's earlier portraits would
seem to show him, he had in him by nature, or
bred into him by fate, something of the haughty
and defiant self-assertion of Dante and Michael
Angelo. In no other English author is the man
so large a part of his works. Milton's haughty
conception of himself enters into all he says
and does. Always the necessity of this one man
became that of the whole human race for the
moment. There were no walls so sacred but
must go to the ground when he wanted elbow-
room; and he wanted a great deal. Did Mary
Powell, the cavalier's daughter, find the abode of
a roundhead schoolmaster incompatible and leave
it, forthwith the cry of the universe was for an
easier dissolution of the marriage covenant. If
he is blind, it is with excess of light, it is a
divine partiality, an overshadowing with angels'
wings. Phineus and Teiresias are admitted
among the prophets because they, too, had lost

310 MILTON

their sight, and the blindness of Homer is of
more account than his " Iliad." After writing in
rhyme till he was past fifty, he finds it unsuit
able for his epic, and it at once becomes " the
invention of a barbarous age to set off wretched
matter and lame metre." If the structure of his
mind be undramatic, why, then, the English
drama is naught, learned Jonson, sweetest Shake
speare, and the rest notwithstanding, and he will
compose a tragedy on a Greek model with the
blinded Samson for its hero, and he will com
pose it partly in rhyme. Plainly he belongs to
the intenser kind of men whose yesterdays are
in no way responsible for their to-morrows. And
this makes him perennially interesting even to
those who hate his politics, despise his Socinian-
ism, and find his greatest poem a bore. A new
edition of his poems is always welcome, for, as
he is really great, he presents a fresh side to each
new student, and Mr. Masson, in his three
handsome volumes, has given us, with much
that is superfluous and even erroneous, much
more that is a solid and permanent acquisition
to our knowledge.

It results from the almost scornful withdrawal
of Milton into the fortress of his absolute per
sonality that no great poet is so uniformly self-
conscious as he. We should say of Shakespeare
that he had the power of transforming himself
into everything ; of Milton, that he had that of

MILTON 311

transforming everything into himself. Dante is
individual rather than self-conscious, and he, the
cast-iron man, grows pliable as a field of grain at
the breath of Beatrice, and flows away in waves
of sunshine. But Milton never lets himself go
for a moment. As other poets are possessed by
their theme, so is he j^f-possessed, his great
theme being John Milton, and his great duty
that of interpreter between him and the world.
I say it with all respect, for he was well worthy
translation, and it is out of Hebrew that the
version is made. Pope says he makes God
the Father reason " like a school-divine." The
criticism is witty, but inaccurate. He makes
Deity a mouthpiece for his present theology, and
had the poem been written a few years later, the
Almighty would have become more heterodox.
Since Dante, no one had stood on these visiting
terms with heaven.

Now it is precisely this audacity of self-reli
ance, I suspect, which goes far toward making
the sublime, and which, falling by a hair's-
breadth short thereof, makes the ridiculous.
Puritanism showed both the strength and weak
ness of its prophetic nurture ; enough of the
latter to be scoffed out of England by the very
men it had conquered in the field, enough of
the former to intrench itself in three or four im
mortal memories. It has left an abiding mark
in politics and religion, but its great monuments

3i2 MILTON

are the prose of Bunyan and the verse of Mil
ton. It is a high inspiration to be the neighbor
of great events ; to have been a partaker in them,
and to have seen noble purposes by their own
self-confidence become the very means of igno
ble ends, if it do not wholly repress, may kindle
a passion of regret, deepening the song which
dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand
loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it
makes him the most impressive figure in our
literary history, is reflected also in his maturer
poems by a sublime independence of human
sympathy like that with which mountains fasci
nate and rebuff us. But it is idle to talk of the
loneliness of one the habitual companions of
whose mind were the Past and Future. I always
seem to see him leaning in his blindness a hand
on the shoulder of each, sure that the one will
guard the song which the other had inspired.

KEATS

KEATS

1854

THERE are few poets whose works con
tain slighter hints of their personal his
tory than those of Keats ; yet there are,
perhaps, even fewer whose real lives, or rather
the conditions upon which they lived, are more
clearly traceable in what they have written. To
write the life of a man was formerly understood
to mean the cataloguing and placing of circum
stances, of those things which stood about the
life and were more or less related to it, but were
not the life itself. But Biography from day to day
holds dates cheaper and facts dearer. A man's
life, so far as its outward events are concerned,
may be made for him, as his clothes are by the
tailor, of this cut or that, of finer or coarser
material ; but the gait and gesture show through,
and give to trappings, in themselves character
less, an individuality that belongs to the man
himself. It is those essential facts which underlie
the life and make the individual man that are of
importance, and it is the cropping out of these
upon the surface that gives us indications by
which to judge of the true nature hidden below.
Every man has his block given him, and the

316 KEATS

figure he cuts will depend very much upon the
shape of that, — upon the knots and twists which
existed in it from the beginning. We were
designed in the cradle, perhaps earlier, and it is
in finding out this design, and shaping ourselves
to it, that our years are spent wisely. It is the
vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are
not that has strewn history with so many broken
purposes and lives left in the rough.

Keats hardly lived long enough to develop
a well-outlined character, for that results com
monly from the resistance made by tempera
ment to the many influences by which the world,
as it may happen then to be, endeavors to mould
every one in its own image. What his tempera
ment was we can see clearly, and also that it
subordinated itself more and more to the dis
cipline of art.

John Keats, the second of four children, like
Chaucer and Spenser, was a Londoner, but, un
like them, he was certainly not of gentle blood.
Lord Houghton, who seems to have had a
kindly wish to create him gentleman by brevet,
says that he was " born in the upper ranks of
the middle class/' This shows a commendable
tenderness for the nerves of English society, and
reminds one of Northcote's story of the violin-
player who, wishing to compliment his pupil,
George III., divided all fiddlers into three

KEATS 317

classes, — those who could not play at all, those
who played very badly, and those who played
very well, — assuring his Majesty that he had
made such commendable progress as to have
already reached the second rank. We shall not
be too greatly shocked by knowing that the
father of Keats (as Lord Houghton had told us
in an earlier biography) " was employed in the
establishment of Mr. Jennings, the proprietor
of large livery-stables on the Pavement in Moor-
fields, nearly opposite the entrance into Fins-
bury Circus." So that, after all, it was not so
bad; for, first, Mr. Jennings was a proprietor;
second, he was the proprietor of an establish
ment; third, he was the proprietor of a large
establishment; and fourth, this large establish
ment was nearly opposite Finsbury Circus, — a
name which vaguely dilates the imagination with
all sorts of potential grandeurs. It is true Leigh
Hunt asserts that Keats " was a little too sensi
tive on the score of his origin," I but we can find
no trace of such a feeling either in his poetry or
in such of his letters as have been printed. We
suspect the fact to have been that he resented
with becoming pride the vulgar "Blackwood " and
" Quarterly " standard, which measured genius by
genealogies. It is enough that his poetical pedi
gree is of the best, tracing through Spenser to
Chaucer, and that Pegasus does not stand at
1 Hunt's Autobiography (Am. ed. ), vol. ii. p. 36.

318 KEATS

livery even in the largest establishments in M oor-
fields.

As well as we can make out, then, the father
of Keats was a groom in the service of Mr. Jen
nings, and married the daughter of his master.
Thus, on the mother's side, at least, we find a
grandfather ; on the father's there is no hint of
such an ancestor, and we must charitably take
him for granted. It is of more importance that
the elder Keats was a man of sense and energy,
and that his wife was a " lively and intelligent
woman, who hastened the birth of the poet by
her passionate love of amusement," bringing
him into the world, a seven-months' child, on
the 29th October, 1795, instead of the 29th of
December, as would have been conventionally
proper. Lord Hough ton describes her as " tall,
with a large oval face, and a somewhat saturnine
demeanour." This last circumstance does not
agree very well with what he had just before
told us of her liveliness, but he consoles us by
adding that "she succeeded, however, in inspir
ing her children with the profoundest affection."
This was particularly true of John, who once,
when between four and five years old, mounted
guard at her chamber door with an old sword,
when she was ill and the doctor had ordered her
not to be disturbed.1

1 Haydon tells the story differently, but I think Lord
Houghton's version the best.

KEATS 319

In 1804, Keats being in his ninth year, his
father was killed by a fall from his horse. His
mother seems to have been ambitious for her
children, and there was some talk of sending
John to Harrow. Fortunately this plan was
thought too expensive, and he was sent instead
to the school of Mr. Clarke at Enfield with his
brothers. A maternal uncle, who had distin
guished himself by his courage under Duncan
at Camperdown, was the hero of his nephews,
and they went to school resolved to maintain
the family reputation for courage. John was
always fighting, and was chiefly noted among
his school-fellows as a strange compound of
pluck and sensibility. He attacked an usher
who had boxed his brother's ears; and when
his mother died, in 1810, was moodily incon
solable, hiding himself for several days in a nook
under the master's desk, and refusing all com
fort from teacher or friend.

He was popular at school, as boys of spirit
always are, and impressed his companions with
a sense of his power. They thought he would
one day be a famous soldier. This may have
been owing to the stories he told them of the
heroic uncle, whose deeds, we may be sure, were
properly famoused by the boy Homer, and
whom they probably took for an admiral at the
least, as it would have been well for Keats's lit
erary prosperity if he had been. At any rate,

320 KEATS

they thought John would be a great man, which
is the main thing, for the public opinion of the
playground is truer and more discerning than
that of the world, and if you tell us what the
boy was, we will tell you what the man longs
to be, however he may be repressed by neces
sity or fear of the police reports.

Lord Houghton has failed to discover any
thing else especially worthy of record in the
school-life of Keats. He translated the twelve
books of the " ^Eneid," read " Robinson Crusoe "
and the " Incas of Peru," and looked into Shake
speare. He left school in i8io,with little Latin
and no Greek, but he had studied Spence's
" Polymetis," Tooke's " Pantheon," and Lem-
priere's " Dictionary," and knew gods, nymphs,
and heroes, which were quite as good company
perhaps for him as aorists and aspirates. It is
pleasant to fancy the horror of those respectable
writers if their pages could suddenly have be
come alive under their pens with all that the
young poet saw in them.1

1 There is always some one willing to make himself a sort
of accessary after the fact in any success; always an old woman
or two, ready to remember omens of all quantities and quali
ties in the childhood of persons who have become distin
guished. Accordingly, a certain " Mrs. Grafty, of Craven
Street, Finsbury," assures Mr. George Keats, when he tells
her that John is determined to be a poet, " that this was
very odd, because when he could just speak, instead of an
swering questions put to him, he would always make a rhyme

KEATS w

On leaving school he was apprenticed for five
years to a surgeon at Edmonton. His master
was a Mr. Hammond, " of some eminence " in
his profession, as Lord Hough ton takes care to
assure us. The place was of more importance
than the master, for its neighborhood to Enfield
enabled him to keep up his intimacy with the
family of his former teacher, Mr. Clarke, and
to borrow books of them. In 1812, when he was
in his seventeenth year, Mr. Charles Cowden
Clarke lent him the " Faery Queen." Nothing
that is told of Orpheus or Amphion is more
wonderful than this miracle of Spenser's, trans
forming a surgeon's apprentice into a great poet.
Keats learned at once the secret of his birth,
and henceforward his indentures ran to Apollo
instead of Mr. Hammond. Thus could the
Muse defend her son. It is the old story, — the
lost heir discovered by his aptitude for what is
gentle and knightly. Haydon tells us " that he

to the last word people said, and then laugh." The early
histories of heroes, like those of nations, are always more or
less mythical, and I give the story for what it is worth.
Doubtless there is a gleam of intelligence in it, for the old lady
pronounces it odd that any one should determine to be a poet,
and seems to have wished to hint that the matter was deter
mined earlier and by a higher disposing power. There are
few children who do not soon discover the charm of rhyme,
and perhaps fewer who can resist making fun of the Mrs.
Graftys of Craven Street, Finsbury, when they have the
chance. See Hay don's Autobiography, vol. i. p. 361.

322 KEATS

used sometimes to say to his brother he feared
he should never be a poet, and if he was not he
would destroy himself." This was perhaps a
half-conscious reminiscence of Chatterton, with
whose genius and fate he had an intense sym
pathy, it may be from an inward foreboding of
the shortness of his own career.1

Before long we find him studying Chaucer,
then Shakespeare, and afterward Milton. But
Chapman's translations had a more abiding in
fluence on his style both for good and evil.
That he read wisely, his comments on the
" Paradise Lost " are enough to prove. He
now also commenced poet himself, but does not
appear to have neglected the study of his pro
fession. He was a youth of energy and purpose,
and, though he no doubt penned many a stanza
when he should have been anatomizing, and
walked the hospitals accompanied by the early
gods, nevertheless passed a very creditable ex
amination in 1817. In the spring of this year,
also, he prepared to take his first degree as poet,
and accordingly published a small volume con
taining a selection of his earlier essays in verse.
It attracted little attention, and the rest of this

1 '« I never saw the poet Keats but once, but he then read
some lines from (I think) the ' Bristowe Tragedy ' with an
enthusiasm of admiration such as could be felt only by a poet,
and which true poetry only could have excited." (J. H. C.,
in Notes and Queries, 4th ser. x. 157.)

KEATS 3*3

year seems to have been occupied with a jour
ney on foot in Scotland, and the composi
tion of " Endymion," which was published in
1 8 1 8. Milton's "Tetrachordon " was not better
abused ; but Milton's assailants were unorgan
ized, and were obliged each to print and pay
for his own dingy little quarto, trusting to the
natural laws of demand and supply to furnish
him with readers. Keats was arraigned by the
constituted authorities of literary justice. They
might be, nay, they were Jeffrieses and Scroggses,
but the sentence was published, and the penalty
inflicted before all England. The difference be
tween his fortune and Milton's was that between
being pelted by a mob of personal enemies and
being set in the pillory. In the first case, the
annoyance brushes off mostly with the mud ; in
the last, there is no solace but the consciousness
of suffering in a great cause. This solace, to a
certain extent, Keats had ; for his ambition was
noble, and he hoped not to make a great reputa
tion, but to be a great poet. Haydon says that
Wordsworth and Keats were the only men he
had ever seen who looked conscious of a lofty
purpose.

It is curious that men should resent more
fiercely what they suspect to be good verses than
what they know to be bad morals. Is it because
they feel themselves incapable of the one and
not of the other ? Probably a certain amount of

324 KEATS

honest loyalty to old idols in danger of dethrone
ment is to be taken into account, and quite as
much of the cruelty of criticism is due to want
of thought as to deliberate injustice. However
it be, the best poetry has been the most savagely
attacked, and men who scrupulously practised
the Ten Commandments as if there were never
a not in any of them, felt every sentiment of their
better nature outraged by the "Lyrical Ballads."
It is idle to attempt to show that Keats did not
suffer keenly from the vulgarities of " Black-
wood " and the "Quarterly." He suffered in
proportion as his ideal was high, and he was
conscious of falling below it. In England, espe
cially, it is not pleasant to be ridiculous, even if
you are a lord ; but to be ridiculous and an
apothecary at the same time is almost as bad as
it was formerly to be excommunicated. A priori^
there was something absurd in poetry written
by the son of an assistant in the livery-stables
of Mr. Jennings, even though they were an
establishment, and a large establishment, and
nearly opposite Finsbury Circus. Mr. Gifford,
the ex-cobbler, thought so in the " Quarterly,"
and Mr. Terry, the actor,1 thought so even
more distinctly in " Blackwood," bidding the
young apothecary " back to his gallipots! " It

1 Haydon {Autobiography, vol. i. p. 379) says that he
"strongly suspects" Terry to have written the articles in
Blackwood.

KEATS 325

is not pleasant to be talked down upon by your
inferiors who happen to have the advantage of
position, nor to be drenched with ditch-water,
though you know it to be thrown by a scullion
in a garret.

Keats, as his was a temperament in which
sensibility was excessive, could not but be galled
by this treatment. He was galled the more that
he was also a man of strong sense, and capable
of understanding clearly how hard it is to make
men acknowledge solid value in a person whom
they have once heartily laughed at. Reputation
is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering
and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but
it is the light by which the world looks for and
finds merit. Keats longed for fame, but longed
above all to deserve it. To his friend Taylor he
writes, " There is but one way for me. The road
lies through study, application, and thought."
Thrilling with the electric touch of sacred leaves,
he saw in vision, like Dante, that small proces
sion of the elder poets to which only elect cen
turies can add another laurelled head. Might
he, too, deserve from posterity the love and re
verence which he paid to those antique glories ?
It was no unworthy ambition, but everything
was against him, — birth, health, even friends,
since it was partly on their account that he was
sneered at. His very name stood in his way, for
Fame loves best such syllables as are sweet and

326 KEATS

sonorous on the tongue, like Spenserian, Shake
spearian. In spite of Juliet, there is a great deal in
names, and when the fairies come with their gifts
to the cradle of the selected child, let one, wiser
than the rest, choose a name for him from which
well-sounding derivatives can be made, and, best
of all, with a termination in on. Men judge the
current coin of opinion by the ring, and are
readier to take without question whatever is
Platonic, Baconian, Newtonian, Johnsonian,
Washingtonian, Jeffersonian, Napoleonic, and
all the rest. You cannot make a good adjective
out of Keats, — the more pity, — and to say a
thing is Keatsy is to contemn it. Fortune likes
fine names.

Haydon tells us that Keats was very much
depressed by the fortunes of his book. This
was natural enough, but he took it all in a manly
way, and determined to revenge himself by writ
ing better poetry. He knew that activity, and
not despondency, is the true counterpoise to
misfortune. Haydon is sure of the change in
his spirits, because he would come to the paint
ing-room and sit silent for hours. But we rather
think that the conversation, where Mr. Haydon
was, resembled that in a young author's first
play, where the other interlocutors are only
brought in as convenient points for the hero to
hitch the interminable web of his monologue
upon. Besides, Keats had been continuing his

KEATS 327

education this year, by a course of Elgin mar
bles and pictures by the great Italians, and might
very naturally have found little to say about
Mr. Haydon's extensive works, that he would
have cared to hear. Lord Houghton, on the
other hand, in his eagerness to prove that Keats
was not killed by the article in the " Quarterly,"
is carried too far towards the opposite extreme,
and more than hints that he was not even hurt
by it. This would have been true of Words
worth, who, by a constant companionship with
mountains, had acquired something of their man
ners, but was simply impossible to a man of
Keats's temperament.

On the whole, perhaps, we need not respect
Keats the less for having been gifted with sen
sibility, and may even say, what we believe to
be true, that his health was injured by the fail
ure of his book. A man cannot have a sensuous
nature and be pachydermatous at the same time,
and if he be imaginative as well as sensuous, he
suffers just in proportion to the amount of his
imagination. It is perfectly true that what we
call the world, in these affairs, is nothing more
than a mere Brocken spectre, the projected
shadow of ourselves ; but so long as we do not
know this, it is a very passable giant. We are
not without experience of natures so purely in
tellectual that their bodies had no more concern
in their mental doings and sufferings than a

328 KEATS

house has with the good or ill fortune of its
occupant. But poets are not built on this plan,
and especially poets like Keats, in whom the
moral seems to have so perfectly interfused the
physical man, that you might almost say he
could feel sorrow with his hands, so truly did
his body, like that of Donne's Mistress Boul-
stred, think and remember and forebode. The
healthiest poet of whom our civilization has been
capable says that when he beholds

"Desert a beggar born,
And strength by limping sway disabeled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority," —

alluding, plainly enough, to the Giffords of his
day,—

" And simple truth miscalled simplicity," —

as it was long afterward in Wordsworth's case, —

"And captive Good attending Captain 111," —

that then even he, the poet to whom, of all
others, life seems to have been dearest, as it was
also the fullest of enjoyment, " tired of all these,"
had nothing for it but to cry for " restful
Death."

Keats, to all appearance, accepted his ill for
tune courageously. He certainly did not over
estimate " Endymion," and perhaps a sense of
humor which was not wanting in him may have
served as a buffer against the too importunate
shock of disappointment. " He made Ritchie

KEATS 329

promise/' says Haydon, " he would carry his
( Endymion ' to the great desert of Sahara and
flingit in the midst." On the 9th October, 1 8 1 8,
he writes to his publisher, Mr. Hessey, " I can
not but feel indebted to those gentlemen who
have taken my part. As for the rest, I begin to
get acquainted with my own strength and weak
ness. Praise or blame has but a momentary
effect on the man whose love of beauty in the
abstract makes him a severe critic of his own
works. My own domestic criticism has given
me pain without comparison beyond what
c Blackwood ' or the c Quarterly ' could inflict ;
and also, when I feel I am right, no external
praise can give me such a glow as my own sol
itary reperception and ratification of what is
fine. J. S. is perfectly right in regard to c the
slipshod " Endymion." That it is so is no
fault of mine. No ! though it may sound a little
paradoxical, it is as good as I had power to
make it by myself. Had I been nervous about
its being a perfect piece, and with that view
asked advice and trembled over every page, it
would not have been written ; for it is not in my
nature to fumble. I will write independently.
I have written independently without judgment.
I may write independently and with judgment ,
hereafter. The Genius of Poetry must work out
its own salvation in a man. It cannot be matured
by law and precept, but by sensation and watch-

330 KEATS

fulness in itself. That which is creative must
create itself. In c Endymion' I leaped headlong
into the sea, and thereby have become better
acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands,
and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the
green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea
and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of
failure; for I would sooner fail than not be
among the greatest."

This was undoubtedly true, and it was nat
urally the side which a large-minded person
would display to a friend. This is what he
thought, but whether it was what he/i?//, I think
doubtful. I look upon it rather as one of the
phenomena of that multanimous nature of the
poet, which makes him for the moment that of
which he has an intellectual perception. Else
where he says something which seems to hint at
the true state of the case. " I must think that
difficulties nerve the spirit of a man : they make
our prime objects a refuge as well as a -passion"
One cannot help contrasting Keats with Words
worth, — the one altogether poet; the other
essentially a Wordsworth, with the poetic faculty
added, — the one shifting from form to form,
and from style to style, and pouring his hot
throbbing life into every mould ; the other
remaining always the individual, producing
works, and not so much living in his poems as
memorially recording his life in them. When

KEATS 33'

Wordsworth alludes to the foolish criticisms on
his writings, he speaks serenely and generously
of Wordsworth the poet, as if he were an un
biassed third person, who takes up the argu
ment merely in the interest of literature. He
towers into a bald egotism which is quite above
and beyond selfishness. Poesy was his employ
ment ; it was Keats's very existence, and he felt
the rough treatment of his verses as if it had
been the wounding of a limb. To Wordsworth,
composing was a healthy exercise ; his slow pulse
and imperturbable self-trust gave him assurance
of a life so long that he could wait ; and when
we read his poems we should never suspect
the existence in him of any sense but that of
observation, as if Wordsworth the poet were
a half-mad land-surveyor, accompanied by Mr.
Wordsworth the distributor of stamps as a kind
of keeper. But every one of Keats's poems was
a sacrifice of vitality ; a virtue went away from
him into every one of them ; even yet, as we
turn the leaves, they seem to warm and thrill
our fingers with the flush of his fine senses, and
the flutter of his electrical nerves, and we do not
wonder he felt that what he did was to be done
swiftly.

In the mean time his younger brother lan
guished and died, his elder seems to have been
in some way unfortunate and had gone to
America, and Keats himself showed symptoms

332 KEATS

of the hereditary disease which caused his death
at last. It is in October, 1818, that we find the
first allusion to a passion which was ere long to
consume him. It is plain enough beforehand
that those were not moral or mental graces that
should attract a man like Keats. His intellect
was satisfied and absorbed by his art, his books,
and his friends. He could have companionship
and appreciation from men ; what he craved of
woman was only repose. That luxurious nature,
which would have tossed uneasily on a crumpled
rose-leaf, must have something softer to rest
upon than intellect, something less ethereal than
culture. It was his body that needed to have its
equilibrium restored, the waste of his nervous
energy that must be repaired by deep draughts
of the overflowing life and drowsy tropical force
of an abundant and healthily poised woman
hood. Writing to his sister-in-law, he says of
this nameless person : " She is not a Cleopatra,
but is at least a Charmian ; she has a rich East
ern look ; she has fine eyes and fine manners.
When she comes into a room she makes the
same impression as the beauty of a leopardess.
She is too fine and too conscious of herself to
repulse any man who may address her. From
habit, she thinks that nothing particular. I al
ways find myself at ease with such a woman ;
the picture before me always gives me a life
and animation which I cannot possibly feel with

KEATS 333

anything inferior. I am at such times too much
occupied in admiring to be awkward or in a
tremble. I forget myself entirely, because I live
in her. You will by this time think I am in love
with her, so, before I go any farther, I will tell
you that I am not. She kept me awake one
night, as a tune of Mozart's might do. I speak
of the thing as a pastime and an amusement, than
which I can feel none deeper than a conversation
with an imperial woman, the very yes and no of
whose life [lips] is to me a banquet. ... I like
.her and her like, because one has no sensation;
what we both are is taken for granted. . . . She
walks across a room in such a manner that a
man is drawn toward her with magnetic power.
... I believe, though, she has faults, the same
as a Cleopatra or a Charmian might have had.
Yet she is a fine thing, speaking in a worldly
way ; for there are two distinct tempers of mind
in which we judge of things, — the worldly,
theatrical, and pantomimical ; and the unearthly,
spiritual, and ethereal. In the former, Bona
parte, Lord Byron, and this Charmian hold the
first place in our minds ; in the latter, John
Howard, Bishop Hooker rocking his child's
cradle, and you, my dear sister, are the con
quering feelings. As a man of the world, I love
the rich talk of a Charmian ; as an eternal being,
I love the thought of you. I should like her
to ruin me, and I should like you to save me."

334 KEATS

It is pleasant always to see Love hiding his
head with such pains, while his whole body is
so clearly visible, as in this extract. This lady,
it seems, is not a Cleopatra, only a Charmian ;
but presently we find that she is imperial. He
does not love her, but he would just like to be
ruined by her, nothing more. This glimpse of
her, with her leopardess beauty, crossing the
room and drawing men after her magnetically,
is all we have. She seems to have been still
living in 1848, and, as Lord Houghton tells us,
kept the memory of the poet sacred. " She is
an East-Indian," Keats says, "and ought to be
her grandfather's heir." Her name we do not
know. It appears from Dilke's " Papers of a
Critic " that they were betrothed : " It is quite
a settled thing between John Keats and Miss

. God help them. It is a bad thing for

them. The mother says she cannot prevent it,
and that her only hope is that it will go off.
He don't like any one to look at her or to speak
to her." Alas, the tropical warmth became a
consuming fire !

" His passion cruel grown took on a hue
Fierce and sanguineous."

Between this time and the spring of 1820 he
seems to have worked assiduously. Of course,
worldly success was of more importance than
ever. He began " Hyperion," but had given it
up in September, 1819, because, as he said,

KEATS 335

" there were too many Miltonic inversions in
it." He wrote " Lamia " after an attentive study
of Dryden's versification. This period also
produced the " Eve of St. Agnes," " Isabella,"
and the odes to the " Nightingale " and to the
" Grecian Urn." He studied Italian, read Ari-
osto, and wrote part of a humorous poem, " The
Cap and Bells." He tried his hand at tragedy,
and Lord Houghton has published among his
" Remains," " Otho the Great," and all that was
ever written of " King Stephen." We think he
did unwisely, for a biographer is hardly called
upon to show how ill his biographee could do
anything.

In the winter of 1 820 he was chilled in riding
on the top of a stage-coach, and came home in
a state of feverish excitement. He was persuaded
to go to bed, and in getting between the cold
sheets, coughed slightly. " That is blood in my
mouth," he said ; " bring me the candle ; let me
see this blood." It was of a brilliant red, and
his medical knowledge enabled him to interpret
the augury. Those narcotic odors that seem to
breathe seaward, and steep in repose the senses of
the voyager who is drifting toward the shore of
the mysterious Other World, appeared to envelop
him, and, looking up with sudden calmness,
he said, " I know the color of that blood ; it is
arterial blood; I cannot be deceived in that color.
That drop is my death-warrant ; I must die."

336 KEATS

There was a slight rally during the summer
of that year, but toward autumn he grew worse
again, and it was decided that he should go to
Italy. He was accompanied thither by his friend,
Mr. Severn, an artist. After embarking, he wrote
to his friend, Mr. Brown. We give a part of
this letter, which is so deeply tragic that the sen
tences we take almost seem to break away from
the rest with a cry of anguish, like the branches
of Dante's lamentable wood.

cc I wish to write on subjects that will not agi
tate me much. There is one I must mention
and have done with it. Even if my body would
recover of itself, this would prevent it. The
very thing which I want to live most for will be
a great occasion of my death. I cannot help it.
Who can help it ? Were I in health it would
make me ill, and how can I bear it in my state ?
I dare say you will be able to guess on what
subject I am harping, — you know what was my
greatest pain during the first part of my illness
at your house. I wish for death every day and
night to deliver me from these pains, and then
I wish death away, for death would destroy even
those pains, which are better than nothing.
Land and sea, weakness and decline, are great
separators, but Death is the great divorcer for
ever. When the pang of this thought has passed
through my mind, I may say the bitterness of
death is passed. I often wish for you, that you

KEATS 337

might flatter me with the best. I think, without
my mentioning it, for my sake, you would be

a friend to Miss when I am dead. You

think she has many faults, but for my sake
think she has not one. If there is anything you
can do for her byword or deed I know you will
do it. I am in a state at present in which wo
man, merely as woman, can have no more power
over me than stocks and stones, and yet the
difference of my sensations with respect to Miss

and my sister is amazing, — the one seems

to absorb the other to a degree incredible. I
seldom think of my brother and sister in Amer
ica ; the thought of leaving Miss is beyond

everything horrible, — the sense of darkness
coming over me, — I eternally see her figure
eternally vanishing; some of the phrases she was
in the habit of using during my last nursing
at Wentworth Place ring in my ears. Is there
another life ? Shall I awake and find all this
a dream ? There must be ; we cannot be created
for this sort of suffering.''

To the same friend he writes again from
Naples, ist November, 1820: —

" The persuasion that I shall see her no more
will kill me. My dear Brown, I should have
had her when I was in health, and I should have
remained well. I can bear to die, — I cannot
bear to leave her. O God ! God ! God ! Every
thing I have in my trunks that reminds me of

338 KEATS

her goes through me like a spear. The silk lin
ing she put in my travelling-cap scalds my head.
My imagination is horribly vivid about her, —
I see her, I hear her. There is nothing in the
world of sufficient interest to divert me from
her a moment. This was the case when I was
in England ; I cannot recollect, without shud
dering, the time that I was a prisoner at Hunt's,
and used to keep my eyes fixed on Hampstead
all day. Then there was a good hope of seeing
her again, — now ! — O that I could be buried
near where she lives ! I am afraid to write to
her, to receive a letter from her, — to see her
handwriting would break my heart. Even to
hear of her anyhow, to see her name written,
would be more than I can bear. My dear Brown,
what am I to do ? Where can I look for con
solation or ease ? If I had any chance of recov
ery, this passion would kill me. Indeed, through
the whole of my illness, both at your house and
at Kentish Town, this fever has never ceased
wearing me out/'

The two friends went almost immediately
from Naples to Rome, where Keats was treated
with great kindness by the distinguished phy
sician, Dr. (afterward Sir James) Clark.1 But

1 The lodging of Keats was on the Piazza di Spagna, in the
first house on the right hand in going up the Scalinata. Mr.
Severn's Studio is said to have been in the Cancello over the
garden gate of the Villa Negroni, pleasantly familiar to all

KEATS 339

there was no hope from the first. His disease
was beyond remedy, as his heart was beyond
comfort. The very fact that life might be happy
deepened his despair. He might not have sunk
so soon, but the waves in which he was strug
gling looked only the blacker that they were
shone upon by the signal-torch that promised
safety and love and rest.

It is good to know that one of Keats's last
pleasures was in hearing Severn read aloud from
a volume of Jeremy Taylor. On first coming
to Rome, he had bought a copy of Alfieri, but,
finding on the second page these lines,
" Misera me! sollievo a me non resta
Altro che il pianto, ed il pianto e delitto,"

he laid down the book and opened it no more.
On the 1 4th February, 1821, Severn speaks
of a change that had taken place in him toward
greater quietness and peace. He talked much,
and fell at last into a sweet sleep, in which he
seemed to have happy dreams. Perhaps he
heard the soft footfall of the angel of Death,
pacing to and fro under his window, to be his
Valentine. That night he asked to have this
epitaph inscribed upon his gravestone: —

" HERE LIES ONE WHOSE NAME WAS WRIT IN WATER."

On the 23d he died, without pain and as if fall-
Americans as the Roman home of their countryman Craw
ford.

340 KEATS

ing asleep. His last words were, " I am dying;
I shall die easy ; don't be frightened, be firm
and thank God it has come ! "

He was buried in the Protestant burial-ground
at Rome, in that part of it which is now disused
and secluded from the rest. A short time before
his death he told Severn that he thought his
intensest pleasure in life had been to watch the
growth of flowers ; and once, after lying peace
fully awhile, he said, " I feel the flowers growing
over me." His grave is marked by a little head
stone on which are carved somewhat rudely his
name and age, and the epitaph dictated by him
self. No tree or shrub has been planted near it,
but the daisies, faithful to their buried lover,
crowd his small mound with a galaxy of their
innocent stars, more prosperous than those
under which he lived.1

In person, Keats was below the middle height,
with a head small in proportion to the breadth
of his shoulders. His hair was brown and fine,
falling in natural ringlets about a face in which
energy and sensibility were remarkably mixed.

1 Written in 1 854. O irony of Time! Ten years after the
poet's death the woman he had so loved wrote to his friend
Mr. Dilke, that " the kindest act would be to let him rest
forever in the obscurity to which circumstances had condemned
him"! {Papers of a Critic, i. n.) O Time the atoner!
In 1874 I f°und the grave planted with shrubs and flowers,
the pious homage of the daughter of our most eminent Amer
ican sculptor.

KEATS 341

Every feature was delicately cut ; the chin was
bold, and about the mouth something of a pug
nacious expression. His eyes were mellow and
glowing, large, dark, and sensitive. At the re
cital of a noble action or a beautiful thought
they would suffuse with tears, and his mouth
trembled.1 Hay don says that his eyes had an
inward Delphian look that was perfectly divine.

The faults of Keats's poetry are obvious
enough, but it should be remembered that he
died at twenty-five, and that he offends by su
perabundance and not poverty. That he was
overlanguaged at first there can be no doubt,
and in this was implied the possibility of falling
back to the perfect mean of diction. It is only
by the rich that the costly plainness, which at
once satisfies the taste and the imagination, is
attainable.

Whether Keats was original or not, I do not
think it useful to discuss until it has been settled
what originality is. Lord Hough ton tells us
that this merit (whatever it be) has been denied
to Keats, because his poems take the color of
the authors he happened to be reading at the
time he wrote them. But men have their intel
lectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one
of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in
the features of a descendant, it may be after a
gap of several generations. In the parliament
1 Leigh Hunt's Autobiography, ii. 43.

34* KEATS

of the present every man represents a constitu
ency of the past. It is true that Keats has the
accent of the men from whom he learned to
speak, but this is to make originality a mere
question of externals, and in this sense the author
of a dictionary might bring an action of trover
against every author who used his words. It is
the man behind the words that gives them value,
and if Shakespeare help himself to a verse or a
phrase, it is with ears that have learned of him
to listen that we feel the harmony of the one,
and it is the mass of his intellect that makes
the other weighty with meaning. Enough that
we recognize in Keats that indefinable newness
and unexpectedness which we call genius. The
sunset is original every evening, though for
thousands of years it has built out of the same
light and vapor its visionary cities with domes
and pinnacles, and its delectable mountains which
night shall utterly abase and destroy.

Three men, almost contemporaneous with each
other, — Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron, — were
the great means of bringing back English poetry
from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recover
ing for her her triple inheritance of simplicity,
sensuousness, and passion. Of these, Words
worth was the only conscious reformer, and his
hostility to the existing formalism injured his
earlier poems by tingeing them with something
of iconoclastic extravagance. He was the deepest

KEATS 343

thinker, Keats the most essentially a poet, and
Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three.
Keats had the broadest mind, or at least his
mind was open on more sides, and he was able
to understand Wordsworth and judge Byron,
equally conscious, through his artistic sense, of
the greatnesses of the one and the many little
nesses of the other, while Wordsworth was iso
lated in a feeling of his prophetic character, and
Byron had only an uneasy and jealous instinct
of contemporary merit. The poems of Words
worth, as he was the most individual, accordingly
reflect the moods of his own nature; those of
Keats, from sensitiveness of organization, the
moods of his own taste and feeling ; and those
of Byron, who was impressible chiefly through
the understanding, the intellectual and moral
wants of the time in which he lived. Words
worth has influenced most the ideas of succeeding
poets; Keats, their forms; and Byron, inter
esting to men of imagination less for his writings
than for what his writings indicate, reappears no
more in poetry, but presents an ideal to youth
made restless with vague desires not yet regu
lated by experience nor supplied with motives
by the duties of life.

Keats certainly had more of the penetrative
and sympathetic imagination which belongs to
the poet, of that imagination which identifies
itself with the momentary object of its contem-

344 KEATS

plation, than any man of these later days. It is
not merely that he has studied the Elizabethans
and caught their turn of thought, but that he
really sees things with their sovereign eye, and
feels them with their electrified senses. His
imagination was his bliss and bane. Was he
cheerful, he " hops about the gravel with the
sparrows " ; was he morbid, he " would reject a
Petrarcal coronation, — on account of my dying
day, and because women have cancers." So
impressible was he as to say that he " had no
nature," meaning character. But he knew what
the faculty was worth, and says finely, " The
imagination may be compared to Adam's dream:
he awoke and found it truth." He had an un
erring instinct for the poetic uses of things, and
for him they had no other use. We are apt to
talk of the classic renaissance as of a phenome
non long past, nor ever to be renewed, and to
think the Greeks and Romans alone had the
mighty magic to work such a miracle. To me
one of the most interesting aspects of Keats is
that in him we have an example of the renais
sance going on almost under our own eyes, and
that the intellectual ferment was in him kindled
by a purely English leaven. He had properly
no scholarship, any more than Shakespeare had,
but like him he assimilated at a touch whatever
could serve his purpose. His delicate senses
absorbed culture at every pore. Of the self-

KEATS . 345

denial to which he trained himself (unexampled
in one so young) the second draft of" Hyperion "
as compared with the first is a conclusive proof.
And far indeed is his " Lamia " from the lavish
indiscrimination of " Endymion." In his Odes
he showed a sense of form and proportion which
we seek vainly in almost any other English poet,
and some of his sonnets (taking all qualities into
consideration) are the most perfect in our lan
guage. No doubt there is something tropical
and of strange overgrowth in his sudden matur
ity, but it was maturity nevertheless. Happy
the young poet who has the saving fault of
exuberance, if he have also the shaping faculty
that sooner or later will amend it !

As every young person goes through all the
world-old experiences, fancying them something
peculiar and personal to himself, so it is with
every new generation, whose youth always finds
its representatives in its poets. Keats rediscov
ered the delight and wonder that lay enchanted
in the dictionary. Wordsworth revolted at the
poetic diction which he found in vogue, but his
own language rarely rises above it, except when
it is upborne by the thought. Keats had an
instinct for fine words, which are in themselves
pictures and ideas, and had more of the power
of poetic expression than any modern English
poet. And by poetic expression I do not mean
merely a vividness in particulars, but the right

346 KEATS

feeling which heightens or subdues a passage
or a whole poem to the proper tone, and gives
entireness to the effect. There is a great deal
more than is commonly supposed in this choice
of words. Men's thoughts and opinions are in
a great degree vassals of him who invents a new
phrase or reapplies an old epithet. The thought
or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes
his at last who utters it best. This power of
language is veiled in the old legends which make
the invisible powers the servants of some word.
As soon as we have discovered the word for our
joy or sorrow we are no longer its serfs, but its
lords. We reward the discoverer of an anaes
thetic for the body and make him member of
all the societies, but him who finds a nepenthe
for the soul we elect into the small academy of
the immortals.

The poems of Keats mark an epoch in Eng
lish poetry ; for, however often we may find
traces of it in others, in them found its most
unconscious expression that reaction against the
barrel-organ style which had been reigning by
a kind of sleepy divine right for half a century.
The lowest point was indicated when there was
such an utter confounding of the common and
the uncommon sense that Dr. Johnson wrote
verse and Burke prose. The most profound
gospel of criticism was, that nothing was good
poetry that could not be translated into good

KEATS 347

prose, as if one should say that the test of suf
ficient moonlight was that tallow candles could
be made of it. We find Keats at first going to
the other extreme, and endeavoring to extract
green cucumbers from the rays of tallow ; but
we see also incontestable proof of the greatness
and purity of his poetic gift in the constant re
turn toward equilibrium and repose in his later
poems. And it is a repose always lofty and
clear-aired, like that of the eagle balanced in
incommunicable sunshine. In him a vigorous
understanding developed itself in equal measure
with the divine faculty ; thought emancipated
itself from expression without becoming in turn
its tyrant ; and music and meaning floated to
gether, accordant as swan and shadow, on the
smooth element of his verse. Without losing
its sensuousness, his poetry refined itself and
grew more inward, and the sensational was ele
vated into the typical by the control of that
finer sense which underlies the senses and is the
spirit of them.

END OF VOLUME V

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